Thermostat local plays well with OpenHAB

Hardware Home Automation
1

Any technology
U.S market
hopefully no cloud and local control plays well with the HABs of Open!!!

2

What bindings do you already use?
I personally would likely look at Z-Wave (verify for US/Canada/Mexico) or possibly Zigbee.

Our Z-Wave database is here.
https://www.cd-jackson.com/index.php/zwave/zwave-device-database/zwave-device-list

3

I looked around a few months ago. There are almost no Zigbee options I was able to find. There are about half a dozen Zwave models but they all look pretty clunky and basic. Even a mid range Honeywell dumb model looked better. Search Amazon for “zwave thermostat” and you will find them all.

I ended up going with HestiaPi. It was on Crowd Source when I ordered it and even though it was a little late in arriving I’ve installed it and am mostly happy. It’s has pretty basic out of the box capabilities but I was able to guarantee that I can separately control the fan, which I was not able to verify on the Zwave models. Also,

  • you have root access to the RPi
  • the main logic is built using openHAB 2.4
  • all the controls and information is exposed over MQTT by default
  • all the code is open source

It’s not the most attractive case because it’s 3D printed, but they are moving to another approach for the cases so that won’t remain a concern for long. And I find the LCD not to be very responsive, but that may be because of something I’ve done and not an inherent limitation. I’ve not started investigating it yet.

But I can say that it works and because it’s running openHAB I’m pretty much guaranteed to understand how it works and make modifications without fear. Long term I can also experiment with hardware changes too, such as replacing the LCD with an e-Ink touch display.

I hesitate to give a full recommendation for it mainly because once you install it you will have to customize it. Out of the box, there are few required features missing including:

  • on a restart all the settings return to a default, not the last recorded setting (apparently they were unaware of restoreOnStartup)
  • the hysteresis is one degree F. That’s far too tight IMHO
  • you may need to apply calibration factors to the sensors, mine seems to be reading 5 degrees F high and about 10% humidity low, but I’m investigating that as well.

But as an openHAB user, I’m confident you could make all these changes and I’m going to feed some of these changes back to the open source project as well.

1 Like
4

Do they plan on updating to 2.5?

5

I have 5 Venstar color touches , the binding is in review right now, but is mature and feature complete ( spoiler I contributed to it). . These have a local rest api over https which is awesome . Very happy. Replaced my Honeywell Zwave devices which were rather buggy. The cloud service is optional and not required to use the local api.

https://venstar.com/thermostats/colortouch/

6

They are kind of loath to update but after reviewing the code I don’t see any reason why they couldn’t. They only use the following addons:

  • exec
  • gpio1
  • http1
  • mqtt
  • map
  • regex
  • basic ui
  • paperui

An upgrade to 2.5 should be pretty painless. But I’m going to take this one step at a time and messing with system updates (Raspbian and openHAB) is something I’m going to look into after I mess around with the code a bit. It doesn’t bother me too much that it’s running older software in the short run. And I’ll help push them to 2.5. But unless someone creates v2 versions of the gpio and http bindings that might be the end of the upgrades for it.

1 Like
7

Aesthetically, I think the GoControl thermostat is…fine? I mean, it’s not as offensively ugly as many others.

https://www.gocontrol.com/detail.php?productId=3

Also, Honeywell is now making a Z-Wave version of their T6 thermostat. I don’t recall seeing this last year, but I’m not paying close attention. I have electric baseboard heating, so my selection is even more limited.

https://www.honeywellhome.com/T6-Pro-Z-wave

8

I can confirm the Honeywell one was not available last year when I was looking. The Go-Control one was going to be my choice but I couldn’t find any guarantees that I could control my central air blower independently with it over Zwave which was a hard requirement. I was going to take the plunge but then I discovered the HestiaPi and thought that one would be fun! :smiley:

2 Likes
9

excellent feedback so far everyone, I’m in a rental and the thermostat is dying, need a replacement asap

10

The Landlord (property owner) should pay for that, correct?