Fancy Thermostats

[midrar]

I'm a fan of things that just work and work well. I use the Insteon thermostat because it integrates well with the ISY. A lot of users have been using zwave for better variety but when it comes to just plain aesthetics, I have yet to see a zwave thermostat with even a color screen that's compatible with the ISY. I'm really not interested in thermostats that are cloud based that can't communicate directly to the ISY or ELK directly.

 

So when I recently walked through the thermostat section at of all places Home Depot, I found some of the coolest looking "WIFI" thermostats but of course none were zwave or insteon compatible. Has anyone been able to easily and more importantly reliably integrate one of the newer thermostats?

[larryllix]

Many want a thermostat that is hard wired to the load for reliability with no wireless anything. However cloud monitoring or minor adjustments via the cloud are fine as along as the basic operation is hard wired.

[lilyoyo1]

I have the ecobee3 thermostats. While mine are not controlled by my ISY they can be. For my use, it does all that I need for it to do on it's on. They also work with Google home and Alexa so regardless of which one you use you would be ok.

[paulbates]

You are describing a demarc: easy to integrate with the ISY vs a fully featured wifi thermostat. The Ecobee 3/4 and Venstar ColorTouch Series are "fancy" full featured color screen wifi thermostats, but they require Automation Shack software running on a 24x7 Network computer, which is a little more difficult to set up.

• Nodelink is for ISY V5 fw
• Ecolink or Venlink is for ISY V4 software
• The Ecobee requires a cloud account to control it
• The Venstars can use a cloud account for remote access (apps), but its not required. They use a local API to the ISY.

FWIW I bit the bullet and went with the Colortouches 3 years ago and it was worth the effort.  I started with Venlink on one of my windows desktops, and moved to a RPi. It is extremely reliable 2 way communication on Venlink and Nodelink. I know others have had great luck with ecobee too.

 

Paul

[KeviNH]

Most of the fancy WiFi thermostats sold for consumer use are cloud-tethered;  any control has to go through a cloud server, not accessible locally, and sometimes only usable via a smartphone app, no public API.   If you want local automation control, you're going to find slim pickings at Home Depot.

 

Honeywell and Trane do offer full-color touchscreen thermostats with Z-Wave.

[MustangChris04]

I'm very happy with my Nest thermostat and using the networking module to integrate. When I lock my zwave door I have it put the Nest into Away (Eco) mode.

[midrar]

Thanks for your input guys.  For the short term, I'm going to stick with my Insteon thermostat and try the Zwave module which leads me into a couple questions.

 

KeviNH, I have seen the Trane color stat but I believe it was zwave that only worked on the proprietary Nexia bridge.  As far as the Honeywell color stat, I have yet to see one.  If you do happen to know which model, please post on this thread. 

 

Also, I recall back about 8-10 years ago or so, Steve Lee was still with Smarthome Pro and he sent me a new driver that was never officially released that would give the Elk the ability to send and receive temperature feedback from the ISY.  Again, this is prior to the Elk module.  This would be useful for anyone with a Elk Navigator.  Sadly though, I never proceeded with it.  Does anyone recall this driver or better yet have tried it?