Recommend a basic setup to start

Hardware
1

I’m going to be attempting to take the initial plunge into home assistant to control the heating in my manufactured home.

My bills have been running 300 plus in the winter and I’m trying to crack down on that. And that’s running from an electric furnace blower motor hidden inside a little closet that blows to all the rooms in the manufactured home. It’s serviced by a small thermostat that you just slide to the desired temperature and that’s it. It’s a totally heat. Only home. There’s no fans for cooling or anything like that. No AC. And for reference this is a 1977 Fleetwood manufactured home.

I also recently learned about relays and that you can use those. I’m guessing in lieu of a thermostat connected to home assistant?

I also have a gas furnace with a 250 gallon tank outside that’s wall mounted below one of the windows in my house that I haven’t used in a couple years.

I would like to keep everything off my Wi-Fi if possible. If not, then not reporting back to any cloud service other than staying with home assistant. And I would like to add a few temperature sensors as well as some type of infrared blaster to start a small 120 volt 1500 watt infrared heater in my back room to keep the pipes from freezing.

So my questions are

  1. What would be a good basic thermostat or relay switch to replace the thermostat for a heat only system? Whichever is best I guess. To use with haos.
    And would it be possible to use a relay on both or thermostat on one relay on the other on like the gas furnace as it has a old sliding thermostat as well, or on both.

  2. What would be some reliable yet cheap temperature sensors probably with zigbee.

  3. I had seen some infrared repeaters/blasters if you want to call them on AliExpress, of course I’m concerned with privacy and tuya. I understand there’s a flashing program but I would like to not have to solder anything. Is there any infrared repeaters that can turn on this? 1500 W 120 volt portable konwin infared heater, that would also have a thermostat and possibly operate on zigbee you could recommend? Possibly with a learning function as I have the original remote still.
    And possibly some kind of repeater as I was hoping to hook up a zigbee door sensor at my mailbox outside to notify when the mail comes

  4. And lastly, I’d seen there was sky connect and sonoff? Both support zigbee and have thread support coming, and the sonoff e-series was the newest one that can be flashed. Is there an advantage over one of the other besides being available now?

If you have links to Amazon or AliExpress it would greatly appreciate it. I drive truck and it’s very hard for me to do everything on the road and I would like to get it done on the days I’m home so I greatly appreciate it.

2

If your heating system has the option you can look into smart TRV’s like these
https://www.aliexpress.com/i/4001148704858.html :

or

All you need is just to connected them to HA via the Skyconnect usb gateway, as for the temp sensor there are various zigbee ones out there, I currently use the aeotec motion sensors that have the temp sensors as well and use a median entity to combine the data into one output for my AC unit to compare against.

That said there should be some that are wall powered as the ones I use are battery but there should be a way to mod battery powered devices to use a power socket instead if the are not rechargeable based where you can just tie in a smart plug to toggle the power on and off at specific percentages to keep them charged and at optimal charge rate for lifespan of use.

In regards to an IR blaster to use with HA most go with the Boadlink RM series: