Looking for suggestions on a thermostat and boiler controls, including hot water channel control, which will work with local control through home assistant. Also would like it if the thermostat could keep working in the event my home assistant server fails, OK may be limited but at least basic control. Also in that fail case also having the ability to manually turn on/off the hot water as well.
Now to some detail of where I am coming from and options I have looked at. I currently have a Secure HRT4 thermostat and SSR302 boiler control working through Z-Wave. The HRT4 is associated directly with the SSR302 sending thermostat set commands to the SSR302. In the main these do exactly what I want but there are a few issues or things which annoy me.
- The SSR302 from time to time goes dead. I haven’t worked out why, sometimes it goes for months and then randomly, normally at an inconvenient time, it goes dead. I have a Z-Wave smart plug in the same room, about as close as I can get a repeater to the SSR302, yet the SSR302 goes dead to home assistant. The HRT4 seems to always keep contact and sending the thermostat set commands to the SSR302, so it mostly affects the hot water control which home assistant is solely responsible for controlling. Home assistant has no issue communicating with other devices on the Z-Wave network.
- The HRT4 takes time responding to changes in home assistant. I know it is to do with battery saving and it only waking up periodically. Still it can be slightly annoying.
- The HRT4 has a somewhat complicated way of setting things up, in the event I need to do a reset and pair again I am not sure if I want to do that again. Admittedly doesn’t come up much but there probably will be a day when it needs to be done.
The first point is probably the one which makes me dislike what I currently have and want to find a replacement, although the others just help make it seem like a good choice to find a replacement.
In looking for replacements I normally hit one of two problems.
- Many smart thermostats do not include hot water control (eg. nest).
- Many do not have local control and rely upon the cloud.
As well as my Z-Wave network, I also have zigbee running. Generally zigbee devices are looking cheaper.
One possibility which I am considering is the Hive thermostat. I would intend to use it without the hub and directly link the components into my zigbee network. However whilst Z2M lists the Hive thermostat and reciever as supported, it seems like it has some strange things you need to do to make it actually work (eg. sending multiple things at one time when changing the mode). If it works well once correctly set up and having home assistant send commands in the right form, then it probably would work for me. However I could foresee being tripped up by this stuff in the future if I were rebuilding my home assistant set up.
Another option is the Tado system, I understand the correct one can be used through matter by home assistant. This though doesn’t quite sit well, its yet another network and hub I will have running in my house and ideally it would also need me to switch my TRVs to get the most from it, could start getting expensive.
So what do you recommend? Is there anything like a better version of my HRT4 and SSR302, a more standard implementation of the Hive SLT3C not needing the specific zigbee commands, etc. Out of my 2 suggestions which is more likely to give a good result?