well this was a long hard road
finally got the thermostats working through the ELK M1 Gold
this path is not a cheap one but seems to be the only path if you want to integrate the 8800/8870 thermostats
went through alot of hoops that was not need to accomplish
it boiled down to doing a factory reset on all my thermostats and they started working with the ELK
the intergration in Home Assistant works as expected so now have control and monitoring of the thermostats on the app
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