I have a Nest Learning thermostat which I have tightly tied into manually written complex logic in HA for opening and closing 10 Flair vents throughout the home taking into acount room presence, temperature, back pressure in the forced air heating/cooling etc.
Occassionally the thermostat goes offline which destroys the vent functionality when in that stste of course.
I was thinking of moving from the nest learning thermostat which does not have matter/local support (the flair vents donât have that either but have been more reliable not going offline as much) and was thinking of just switching to a newer nest model that does have the mater support but I was just reading they do not support the hvac_action, which is required. Due to the timing with vents that do not open immediately (1 minute delay or so), to rely upon hvac_mode is not the way to go (it could be on âheatâ and not be blowing also), etc., etc.
A long term project for me is to convert these vents to being local and that will be some surgery on my part on those, but I am asking here - and I donât care if the names or types of properties of the thermostat are the same as the above - but is there a local only via wifi thermostat that I can use to replace the nest unit (I prefer not to use anything that requres an extra hub etc (not zigbee or zwave)) - ?
One solution Iâve found (which requires tinkering with your HVAC system a bit) is to connect a relay to the power inputs for the pump that pumps water for my heating system. (You can probably do something similar with an air handler and its fan.) The relay then provides a dry contact for a sensor; I use a homemade ESP32 sensor, but you could easily use a Zigbee or Z-wave sensor too. When the dry contact is closed, Home Assistant is notified that the heating system is active (in effect, hvac_action is âheatingâ).
Kudos to you but I am too lazy for that lol⌠Looking for a thermostat I can just buy that will do the work needed via matter⌠It does not have to have the same exact kind of properties, just as long as there is a way to program and act upon changes with the same functionality available that I have nowâŚ
If there isnât anything out there then maybe I will have to resort to utilizing something similar to your clever trickery
Although I havenât yet moved away from the Nest Learning Thermostat and actually wanted to as it was not local and there were connectivity issues, I think I have resolved the connectivity problem by alot of research and some network weaks, so replacing has gone way down on my priority list. Here are the settings I am using (the SSID one maybe overill but this combination is working flawlessly, take what you want from this!). The below underlined items are the most important in priority order, the rest are miscellaneous tweaks:
WiFi Protocol is WPA3, NOT WPA3
Band Steering turned off
DHCP Lease time is 120 minutes (should never be less)
On IT"S OWN 2.4Ghz SSID which does not have 5 Ghz, however it IS on an IOT VLAN shared with many other devices, and the SSID is NOT hidden.
