Hi, new to using home assistant and I moved into a house with a system that is not friendly to home assistant. I want to switch one one that works well with it, but I can’t seem to tell which is the best. Can someone point me in the right direction. One that lets me integrate locally only. I don’t want to have a 3rd party subscription. Thanks.
“Best” is just an opinion. I recommend you start with your own requirements. First and foremost, where are you located? Different regions and countries do things a bit differently. For the US, the next question would be whether your existing thermostats are old-style, 2-wire heat-only units, or have multiple wires connected. You’d also want to rule out proprietary data protocols that some HVAC units use. If you don’t have a “C” wire, I’d work very hard to connect one and run it to the 'stat.
After all that, you can start designing your solution. I agree that there should be a strong preference for local control. But that’s not absolute. For example, if you live in a cold climate and might be away sometimes, do you really trust HA to have complete control? Let’s face it, HA is a tinkerer’s paradise, but even the developers have given up the idea that there will ever be a “version 1” that’s truly ready for production.
Fully local thermostats don’t always get good reviews here. No doubt someone will be along to sing the praises of their favorite. I won’t disagree, but be sure to read up and make sure whatever you choose works for you.
There are integrations to allow HA to control most of the name-brand smart thermostats, albeit through the vendor’s cloud. Is it really that bad to have a backup way to control your system? That depends on how critical your HVAC system is to you. My smart thermostats work fully independently if the WiFi is down, or can be controlled through the vendor’s cloud, or (what I usually do) by HA via the vendor’s cloud.
As @CaptTom mentions, “best” is highly subjective and you are better off searching for that specific topic in these forums to find dozens of long discussions about who people prefer and why. For me, I’ve posted on enough of these that I’m just going to refer people to search so I’m not typing out the same long response over and over again.
Pop your current thermostat off, take a picture of the wiring into the current thermostat, people here can probably look at that and tell you what kind of thermostat might be a direct replacement for you. Be sure to let us know where you are, that makes a big difference too.
Thank you to you and @CO_4X4 for the great info. I will look up other posts and also put the requested info here. I live in Georgia in the USA. The house was built in 2018 and has two thermostats. I will add pics of the wiring. I am planning on setting up a Linux framework for
Home assistant as well as other things. I have extensive experience on the server side. I’m not
As good with the home equipment, so I prefer simple on the home side and complex on the server integration side. I prefer no cloud based stuff but I can tolerate it if I have some that stop working if I don’t have service with them. That is my problem now. I have a vivent system and it won’t work if I dont buy their service. I plan to add other things in later. But this one was the one of most concern to me since it is colder and we are having problems with this Vivent system.