Hi! I am running Umbrel on a Raspberry Pi 4 and I have “Home Assistant” installed in it, I oly have some smart lights connected to it. I would like to integrate a Thermostat with HA. But I am a bit overwhelmed with the different types of connections (Z-wave, Zigbee, Wifi, …)
Do you guys have any kind of recommendation, what connection is better? I would like to keep it local (or connecting remotely via Tailscale) but I would like to avoid any cloud or third-party server solution.
What thermostat hardware can I buy?
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I’ve recently started with home assistant on a pi as well. Today I have 2 zigbee relay for my lights from Sonoff, 2 zigbee fire alarms, 1 wifi plug from Shelly and 3 Ikea remotes working on Matter over Thread.
Basically, any protocol you want to support other than wifi and Bluetooth will need a dedicated radio device. Luckily they are all pretty well supposed with home assistant. I have 2 Aeotec Zi-stick, one for Zigbee, the other flashed with OpenThread firmware (that’s for Matter over Thread, it wasn’t a good idea to buy twice the same device, I had to work around this issue). I don’t have Z-wave devices today, as I noticed they tend to be more expensive that the zigbee equipment. The new IKEA smart devices are very competitive in terms of price, they all work on Matter over Thread protocol.
In the end, you don’t need to choose. You can support all these protocols on the same raspberry pi. It’s just a matter of adding the corresponding radio and integration in home assistant.
Definitely Zigbee or Z-wave instead of wifi. Once you start to build out more devices you will be glad to not have gone down the wifi route.
I went with Zigbee and have Sonoff SNZB-02 temperature and humidity sensors in each room that have been absolutely flawless since the day I installed them, and they last about two years on a single battery!
I would obviously recommend them but I don’t have any experience of other thermostats or of Z-wave.
I did also install smart Zigbee TRVs on each radiator but I don’t rely on the internal thermostats of them as they don’t accurately represents the overall room temperature.
If you’re just starting to build out, what about using thread instead of zigbee or zwave?
Well Thread allows devices to require internet connectivity to pair. It also allows devices to fetch firmware updates from the manufacturer. And it allows features to be locked to their specific app. Thread and Matter are more complex to setup self-hosted style; it makes no difference when you use official hubs though. Thread doesn’t have many device types and manufacturers available.
Zigbee does not require or work over the internet, no trust required. It is very easy to setup self-hosted. There is a Zigbee everything made by everyone from large companies to random brandless places.
Zigbee is my preference as a result of the internet connectivity requirement. I do not trust random manufacturers to not brick my devices when they go out of business or choose to release a competing product.
Well that leaves me with mixed feelings.
Thread itself doesn’t need Internet connectivity, but thread seems to almost always be paired with matter, which does (during provisioning).
I like that matter provisioning requires verification of their certificate, but I don’t like that certificates can expire or the certificate authority can shut down. Although maybe that’s all taken care of by the DCL? In which case that’d be fine.
In theory, Home Assistant could also give users the option to ignore certificate checks.
I also haven’t seen specific details on whether Home Assistant’s implementation allows sensors to contact the internet by default or what setting changes this.
It’s just foggier and less user focused by design in my opinion. But as one would expect when Google and other large corporations were the ones to develop it,
I second that solution. I’ve built the same setup for my home last Christmas, even tried different brands of TRVs to see which one I like. Works perfectly well with a Raspberry Pi with Home Assistant. The only issues I ran into were my lack of experience.
https://www.amazon.com/Honeywell-Home-TH6320ZW2007-Programmable-Touchscreen/dp/B0BHTQF8NL
That is the one you want. Honeywell t6 pro Z-Wave version, specifically that link which is the newer Smart start version.
Z-Wave is 100% local, not Wi-Fi, and secure.
I use these in my house and couldn’t be happier.
This is what I installed last year after I got an open box model online for a significant discount. It was easy to set up and works great with HA.
Another vote for this option. I’ve had mine for three years and it’s been rock solid. I’m not using the built in schedule, I’m controlling everything through HA
And another vote for it. It’s been great. The only thing I miss is it doesn’t have multi-speed support but most setups don’t have multi-speed motors anyway.
I like this one but I’m not sure why a $5 microcontroller, 4-5 relays and a screen costs so much. And it’s not even a great screen. I kinda like it to be more of a full color LCD screen. Just my opinion.
Welcome to the world of electronic gadgets. You’re right there’s nowhere near $100 worth of hardware in this thing. I’d also love a color touchscreen. But I’d rather a color touchscreen that I could integrate in HA than one running some proprietary cloud connected ThermostatOS.
You could do that yourself- put an old tablet on the wall, run power to it, then get something like a zooz zen16 multi-relay or an ESPHome relay board to drive the hvac. Then the thermostat becomes a totally software defined virtual thing in Home Assistant that pulls data from a temp sensor in the room and controls the HVAC as appropriate.
The house I bought had one of these installed already. Works great with the homeassistant ZWA-2 antenna.
Nest Thermostat Gen 1 or Gen 2 running NoLongerEvil firmware. You can pick up a gen 2 on eBay for 20-30 USD. It only takes 5 min to load the firmware and there is a HA native integration. Rock solid hardware with no cloud, no google, and it works great with HA. Note that the gen 1 and gen 2 are pre Google buyout of Nest. There is also a cloud hosted dashboard if you want BUT there is no cloud self-hosted docker server and no cloud HA only version as well.
Edit: Nest is WiFi
Wait what?!?! I have two gen 2 nests and there’s third party firmware?!?!
Edit: you made my day… Thanks!!!
Nice 👍 been using NLE as a docker server for a while, just switched to the HA integration (note both options use MQTT to allow HA full control with a climate card).
The other recommendations are good, but please please double check your tstat wiring and/or HVAC system to ensure they are compatible. One of the few stats that work with my system without shenanigans is the Honeywell T10 Pro (which also worked out of the box with HA). This required me to rewire the control run to use it, and is not something I would recommend for people who aren’t prepared to cook the control board on their furnace if they do an oopsie or regularly read electrical diagrams.
I’m using a Drayton Wiser thermostat, which uses WiFi but has a fully local integration via HACS. Has worked great for me so far.
I’m currently using a Meross thermostat as it was relatively cheap: https://shop.meross.com/collections/smart-thermostat/products/matter-smart-thermostat-mts300ma
Currently using the meross_lan (https://github.com/krahabb/meross_lan) integration to make it work because my LAN doesn’t support Matter.
Depends on what you’re controlling and your geographic location.
I think you can use home kit ones locally… which really broadens your options
GoControl GC-TBZ48, 6 years and running, not a single issue. ZWave.
