I am looking for a thermostat that does not require someone else’s cloud server for full functionality. As we all know, a cloud server can be switched off any time on a whim (I’m looking at you, Honeywell) and we are left with a very nice brick.
I only have convential forced hot air single stage. Humidity display is mandatory, as I live in Alaska, USA, and inside humidity can easily drop to the teens.
Any ideas? There used to be an extensive equipment list in openHAB 3, but not so much in openHAB 4. I have searched the community postings, and not found what I need
The Residio API (same API as Honeywell Home just rebranded) is still there and works with my Honeywell thermostat. There is even a preliminary add-on for it on the marketplace: Honeywell home thermostat Binding
My understanding was Honeywell was consolidating APIs, not shutting them down with no replacement.
My Honeywell reference was to their product they marketed more than 10 years ago, the Vista ICM. Vista ICM enabled remote access to a Honeywell/Ademco IDS (Intrusion Detection System) but required connection to Honeywell’s servers for its functionality. Honeywell shut down their servers 6 months after I bought the item for $200. Did not see that coming. Once bit twice shy, which is why I refuse to consider anything that is not 100% functional stand-alone. Like the Ring camera. Refused to buy one, even though promoted by a certain professional group I belong to.
Honeywell’s higher-end thermostats require they be registered before all functionality is enabled, and certain functionality, such as outside temperature, require a connection to Honeywell’s cloud servers, per Honeywell’s documentation. See e.g. the user’s guide for Honeywell’s WiFi 9000, page 3. This rules out for me certain of Honeywell’s products.
The nice thing about OH3’s equipment list was that it was far more inclusive than what I am able to easily find with my own searches, and all in one place. IIRC, the list included a few dozen thermostat models, at least.
I’m not sure how the thermostat is supposed to get the outside temp otherwise short of having an external sensor that communicates directly with the thermostat. If you find one that does that let me know. I never found anything like that when I looked a couple years ago. The thermostat doesn’t really need the outside temp anyway so it’s not that big of a loss in functionality.
The T6 WiFi does require to use their cloud. Their Zwave one does not. So watch out which model you are looking at.
Of course the Zwave will require a Zwave controller and all that jazz and it’s not going to support outside temperature.
I really am curious what equipment list you are referring to. I’m not aware of any officially created list and if someone took it upon themselves to create one, it was almost certainly never completed and such lists are almost impossible to maintain.
You are entirely correct. Outside temperature is a convenience feature for me and it annoys me that Honeywell’s offering requires their cloud for this feature. I cannot locate it now, but I recall at least one thermostat that did, in fact, have a probe for outside temperature. When it is -30F/-34C outside it is helpful to get that clue so one can 5 minutes pre-heat one’s ancient gasoline-fueled conveyance. At those outside temperatures, one must also monitor the inside hunidity and adjust accordingly.
As for the list, IIRC it was somehow connected with the list of bindings for things, but I am ancient and the exact location escapes me now.
Again, thank you for your comments and feedback. If I ever find something that meets my requirements, I will post it here.
In that scenario there are any number of other sources to get the outside temperature including some outdoor rated zwave and zigbee sensors up to and including whole weather stations, if you don’t want to use cloud even for weather information (I assume you don’t care about forecast).
I live in Colorado at 7000+ elevation. Humidity is a concern for me too. But even more than temperature, humidity tends to be fairly localized in individual rooms and the humidifiers run independently of what the outside humidity is. It doesn’t matter if the outside humidity is 5% or 50% (I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a humidity that high though, 40% is a really humid day here), if the room where my wife keeps her instruments is under 40%, the humidifier in that room needs to turn on. If the humidity remains low after turning on, I need an alert to remember to fill the tank. To do that, I need a sensor in the room. I don’t need it from where the thermostat is. Each room where we control humidity has a dumb humidifier controlled by a smart outlet.
To run these humidifier rules I use Threshold Alert and Open Reminder [4.0.0.0;4.9.9.9], one instance created to drive the humidifiers and another instance created to alert me when the humidity remains too low.
Each individual binding will often list those devices it is compatible with but I don’t know of any comprehensive list of devices that has ever been published. Maybe you are thinking of the Zwave database? That is used by the Zwave binding and it’s pretty extensive, but it’s only Zwave devices and does not include anything that uses other technologies.
There are literally tens of thousands of devices that are compatible with OH. Just building such a list would be a herculean task.
