Best Thermostat for Home Automation - GoControl TBZ48

Hardware
1

One of the first few things even non-enthusiast users make “smart” in their home is the Thermostat. This is largely because products like the Google Nest Thermostat and the Ecobee Thermostat do a reasonably good job of acting as standalone devices to handle climate control. They are even equipped with learning mechanisms to predict when you’ll be home or away and set your thermostat accordingly.

But, as Home Automators we often have sensors that will provide a lot more data than these closed ecosystems have access to. So the question becomes, which products work best at accepting additional inputs?

I went looking for something that would offer more control and found the GoControl TBZ48 ZWave Thermostat to be the best for Home Automation.

It’s best feature is that it allows you to send it the “current temperature” based on anything your system can produce.

This device accepts a Remote Sensor Temperature via ZWave Configuration.

First you want to set the “Remote Sensor Node Number” to “1”. This only has to be done once and it’s what tells the thermostat that you’ll be sending your own local temperature data. This is set with Configuration Parameter “43” in Command Class “112”.

Next, you can send whatever temperature you calculate for your home as “Remote Sensor Temperature” in Configuration Parameter “46” of Command Class “112”.

With this, you can get your thermostat integrated into your system exactly as you want it.

Check out my article on this for even more information.

3 Likes
2

I have had this thermostat running for over a year and it has been great. I just now started looking at utilizing the remote sensor option on this thermostat. When looking at the documentation/manual, I was changing parameter 43 to the zwave node/device ID of the sensor I wanted to use. That didn’t see to work, but I haven’t tried the method you outline above. I will give that a try this weekend.

Also, how/where do you configure the transfer of the remote sensor to parameter 46? I could easily do that in Node Red, I just have to figure out the JSON (not my strong suit).

http://manuals-backend.z-wave.info/make.php?lang=en&sku=GC-TBZ48L&cert=ZC10-17055590

3

These days, with ZWaveJS, the service call is:

service: zwave_js.set_value
entity_id: climate.whatever
command_class: 112
property: 46
value: “{{ states(‘sensor.your_temp_sensor_here’) }}”

4

I got it working a bit ago. Thanks for the help.

Below is what I have in the Call Service/Data section of Node-Red:

{
    "command_class": "112",
    "property": "46",
    "value": "{{result}}"
}
5

I’m sure my case is pretty unique, but I wanted to share in case someone else ends up in my situation. The “Remote Sensor Node Number” (Configuration Parameter number 43) needs to be set to the node ID number of the Z-Wave controller. Most are “1”, but I migrated from a 500 series to 700 series and the new controller node ID ended up being a number other than 1.