I’m looking to upgrade my dumb thermostat, but there is such a wide range in prices. The Nest or Ecobee are similar, in the $150-200 range, and there are similar Honeywell offerings.
However, there are also some in the $40-80 range from Vine, and again Honeywell.
I intend to have it controlled through Home Assistant, so the apps make no difference to me. I don’t really understand the huge range of prices. Isn’t a thermostat essentially an on-off switch connected to a sensor? If the “smart” parts are being handled on the server, is there any real benefit to the more expensive ones?
What am I missing?
Does anyone here use a vine thermostat? How do you like it?
How does your thermostat stack up?
I looked for a long time and never found any that didn’t have cloud connections requirements. So I settled for a “dumb” one that has automatic hot/cold switching.
Isn’t a thermostat essentially an on-off switch connected to a sensor?
Depends on your boiler. Some get a value from the thermostat depending on the difference to target temperature - which then makes the boiler control the heating intensity. And others just use an on/off kind of control.
In this place I’m renting here, there’s a Honeywell CM927 on the wall and a BDR91 which, indeed, seems to be just a simple on/off switch.
So, depending on your boiler, you could get away with a cheap Zigbee/Wifi switch module (mostly sold for lights - just make sure it has a separate switch circuit and is not sending live mains power to the boiler!) and feed room temperatures into Home Assistant via cheap temperature sensors. Then implement the whole heating logic in HA.
(nb. Most newer thermostats “learn” how long it takes to heat up the room to the target temperature and will adjust the starting time of the heating process accordingly. This way, you never have to change your schedules between winter and summer. This is also something you’d have to implement yourself, if you want HA to do all the heating.)
What the heck is a boiler?
It’s a thermostat. You program the temp as usual. Then occasionally I feel cold in my bed and will connect with my phone to raise the temp. You don’t need anything fancy here, temp control isn’t rocket science. My friend said he stayed at an air bnb with a nest and it had learned the previous hosts preferred temperature so he was always turning it down. Ymmv he is kinda old and analog guy.
