I’ve been thinking about adding a smart thermostat to my line up of home devices for a while now, but just can’t make my mind up which. I feel it’s a bigger decision than anything I’ve done so far - lights and so on are fun to play with but a boiler thermostat is critical.
I’ve ruled out Nest and Hive as I’m looking for a straight replacement for my current wired thermostat. Netatmo and Tado fit the bill and both have comparable features. Netatmo lacks geofencing, but it looks like that could be done in the API via HA.
However, I’m concerned about relying on cloud services, and I’ve found a ZWave thermostat that I could use. That would mean handling all of the automation in HA, and I’d miss out on all the fancy GUI scheduling and reporting that the other products have.
So my dilemma - do I go the DIY ZWave route and maybe build all of that myself or just go with an off the shelf solution that does it all?
Has anyone else gone the DIY route and if so how are you getting on?
Or any happy/disappointed Netatmo or Tado users?
I’m at the point now where the pros and cons of each approach cancel each other out and I might as well toss a coin!
Not tried to diy so i got a netamo. It’s been flawless. Also super easy to replace my old thermostat. Needed no electrical wiring. Just pop 2 wires in from boiler that were in the old thermostat and plug in the hub and done. £100 well spent. It doesn’t do geo stuff, so i did that all in HA. Works great!
Good to hear the Netatmo’s working well. The easy installation is one of the reasons I like the look of it, plus the fact that it defaults to the last known schedule if it loses internet connectivity - basically it would fall back to the same functionality as my current thermostat.
On the other hand the ZWave one has the same two wire installation, and I can do the normal scheduling in HA, and easily add presence. The main thing I’d be missing is the reporting and the predictive capability of the netatmo - i.e. figuring out when to start heating to reach a certain temperature at a certain time based on the weather and the historical data it collects.
I’m curious, in what way is Nest not a replacement for your current wired thermostat?
I had kinda decided on Nest myself, but now the weather’s warming up my heating will be off until September/October now so I’ve put heating on the back burner for now (excuse the pun!), in favour of more lighting and some cameras.
Interested to see where this thread takes you, and the review of the Netmato by @CommonBlob clearly means I’m going to have to review it all again after Summer!
The Nest requires more wiring into the boiler for the heat link. I’ve already got a wired thermostat that takes the two control wires, and the Netatmo is a direct replacement.
I think I’ve decided to go with one of these, because I can control it entirely from my own server running HA, and it defaults to being a dumb thermostat if that was temporarily out of action.
I’ll start off with simple HA automations for scheduling, with the option of manual overrides via HA, and then start looking at ways to capture the stats and add more intelligent scheduling based on how long it takes the house to heat up.
Yeah, I think I’m settled on the Nest tbh. I don’t think 4 wires is that much more complicated than two, and it just seems like the more stable platform when reading all the reviews.
The z-wave option was my first thought before I even bought my first item of HA stuff, and was going to use z-wave stuff for everything I could, but in all honesty I’ve found the z-wave platform to be a bit clunky (having fitted two light switches and a multi sensor) and am only planning to add extra z-wave devices now where there is no other reasonable option.
It is kind of an issue for me. I’m happy replacing the thermostat on the wall that has the two control wires, that’s easier than wiring a plug. Opening up the boiler and figuring out how to wire in the heat link is a bit trickier, plus there’s nowhere convenient to the boiler for the link.
It was actually Nest being affected by the AWS outage the other week that made me rethink using any cloud connected device for the thermostat - not singling out Nest, but just the principle of relying on the cloud.
Yeah, totally get the cloud based thing. I’m constantly between a rock and a hard place when trying to select the next component, always weighing up the pros and cons.
Z-wave clunkiness (if that’s even a word?) for me may be the fact that I don’t use a hub, my set up is a raspberry pi hosting home assistant with a Zwave.me daughter board, controlling everything via HA and open z-wave so ymmv, but I’ve had it really struggle to add nodes, then when you do add nodes it picks up some things and not others, and then you have to remove the node (which is not as easy as you would expect) and then add it again, and so on.
Once its in and configured it seems to work great, and I’ve even reconfigured one of my fibaro dimmers via HA so that it considers maximum brightness to be about 80% of the light’s capability because the brightness of the lights was too much before. But I’m always kinda waiting for something to not work with it, because of the problems I had getting them linked in the first place, if you know what I mean? Whereas my Hue setup is instant and flawless and feels ‘solid’ in comparison.
I’m doing similar - I’ve got a USB ZWave controller attached to my “home server” (i.e. small PC!) running HA. I haven’t encountered any problems so far, which is why I’m thinking of giving it a go for the thermostat.
I do know the feeling of waiting for things to fail though. One of the reasons I’m switching over to ZWave and an open solution is the flakiness I found with Samsung SmartThings and the battery operated sensors - when the batteries needed replacing I had a real struggle getting the devices to reappear.
OK, so I bought a ZWave thermostat… and I’m not sure, might return it… I’ve been running it without the boiler connection just to get a feel for it. The screenshot shows a few of the issues.
The blue line is the recorded temperature - note how it doubles back on itself. Looking at the database, I think HA may have confused last_updated with last_changed for one data point, but I’m not sure.
The red line is the set point. I didn’t set it to -5! For some reason one of the sends of setpoint must have been corrupted and misinterpreted. At the time that happened, the thermostat thought the set point was +5, but HA thought it was -5.
The absurdly accurate current temperature looks like some kind of floating point issue.
I’ve also noticed that the controls for changing set point seem to switch between the up and down arrows and a slider. At first I thought it was varying according to screen size (e.g. phone vs. browser), but that doesn’t seem to be the case.
The actual boiler state - i.e. whether the thermostat is calling for heat or not - isn’t shown. It’s buried in an attribute (operating_state) that isn’t presented in the display.
I’ve also been unable to change the wake_up_interval, which has defaulted to 256s. This is a shorter interval than recommended in the manual, which suggests no less than 900s to maintain battery life.
Some of these issues are the thermostat, some could be HA or the underlying openzwave, and I’m sure they’re all fixable given time and effort. I’m just not sure I’m willing to risk it for something as important as the boiler.
I guess I’m starting to see what @anon43302295 means about ZWave being clunky.
Do tou have a netatmo? I’m considering to buy one for my boiler, but I’m concerned about the actions that could be triggered using HA.
Could tou please share which services are available?
I’ve got a netatmo thermostat, mostly just triggering away mode from HA when everyone is out, or disabling when someone comes home. I had an issue with the cloud based stuff, and only had a 2 wire thermostat, but in the end went for the netatmo, because the zwave ones looked a little basic.
I’ve got Hive, mainly because it was only £60, and that’s been great. Can do everything either through HA or the Hive app and automations make up for the features other have like @pembo has with his home and away one.
That is it though they’ll be bargains about for BF, expect around £125 or less if you’re lucky.
The one I got was when there was a clearance of the original version, they were £60 for ages at Screwfix and Toolstation for months but they’re long gone. Identical functionality to the current version but the box looks like a normal thermostat.
Sorry if it caused confusion but I meant the only reason i bought it was because it was cheap at the time otherwise I probably wouldn’t have bothered although now having it I find it very useful, particularly as there is no limit to how you can programme it.
