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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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.
+1 for ZigBee - if cost is a factor you can get really cheap ZigBee devices from AliExpress and the like - $10 or less per temperature sensor. Z-wave requires certification for all devices supporting it, so they tend to be more expensive and more limited in variety.
Blakadder’s ZigBee Repository is a great resource for verifying device compatibility with your chosen ZigBee integration - ZHA or Zigbee2mqtt. This might depend on your coordinator choice, as some (such as the Home Assistant Gen 1 usb-drive ones) only support ZHA, for example.
For a coordinator, the Home Assistant brand ones are reportedly quite good, especially the second gen one. I personally use a SMLight SLZB-06, reasonably priced and supports power over Ethernet, so I have it wall mounted centrally. I also have my home assistant instance running in a separate building, so something that works over IP was a must.
I probably would have gone with zwave or thread but zigbee is always way cheaper. Maybe someday the others will come down in price.
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.
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
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.
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:
Fewer Letters More Letters HA Home Assistant automation software ~ High Availability IP Internet Protocol MQTT Message Queue Telemetry Transport point-to-point networking RPi Raspberry Pi brand of SBC SBC Single-Board Computer Zigbee Wireless mesh network for low-power devices
5 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 13 acronyms.
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They’re all generally fine. WiFi thermostats open up more security holes than the others because they are designed to be chatty. I have an ecobee WiFi thermostat that’s isolated to only talking to HA locally using the HomeKit integration, which is fine, but I can’t say I’d recommend it.
When I set up my thermostat the ZigBee/Z-Wave options were quite frankly ugly and had limited wiring compatibility. Nowadays there’s a bunch more options on the market - you should be fine finding what you need anywhere.
ZigBee/Z-Wave/Thread are all pretty comparable, so I’d go with whatever you already have on your network - me personally I’m all in on ZigBee right now so I’d probably get one of those.
If you’re undecided, HA newest official hardware supports ZigBee & Thread so I’d go with one of those.
I use ZigBee and have lots of the sonoff trv’s. I tried a few Chinese ones and definitely DO NOT recommend.
Buy the sonoff ones, they still get firmware updates after two years. Batteries last about 1 year in my experience which is good too
Same. They are great.
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.
Depends on what you’re controlling and your geographic location.
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 use a hive thermostat & a variety of radiator valves (hive, aqara, sonoff), all #zigbee & compatible with #homeassistant through the excellent #zigbee2mqtt.
I think you can use home kit ones locally… which really broadens your options
