Hi everyone! I’m a first time home buyer and could use some advice on multi-zone configurations. I’m about to buy a three level, ~3000 sq ft townhouse with central air. I don’t know much about the overall system (other than it is made by Carrier), but I did notice it appears to only have a single thermostat the for the entire house. This seems very inefficient to me, so one of the first things I want to do is convert it to a multi-zone configuration. Since I will have to add all the dampers, thermostats, and control logic, can anyone provide some recommendations on the best way to do this in a home-automation friendly way?
I would like to have a total of 7 zones and would like to avoid running additional wires if possible. Ideally, there would be a central system with all the brains and basic/dumb thermostats in the various areas that were nothing more than a sensor and a screen. I know I could do something like a Honeywell HZ432 zone controller with redlink to a bunch of z-wave enabled thermostats, but it seems like there should be a much simpler (and cheaper!) solution…
I should note I am a programmer by trade and am more than happy to create custom software or logic boards. However, I am trying to minimize both costs and the number of hoops I have to go through to make this work. I was planning on buying the Vera 3 as the main home controller, but I am open to suggestions. (While I have experience with mobile devices, I am new to both z-wave and home automation.)
I apologize if this has been asked before. Thanks for any information you can provide!
IIUC, you currently have a single zone and 1 t-stat, and are looking to go to 7 zones and 7 t-stats, without adding wiring? Not sure (assuming you’re in the U.S.) there are Z-Wave t-stats that are completely wireless.
Maybe you can look at the Radio Thermostat 3M-50 Wifi support, there is a tread about it on this forum.
I’m not sure if you can use it for multi-zone environments, but since it supports Wifi, maybe it is a possibility?
IIUC, you currently have a single zone and 1 t-stat, and are looking to go to 7 zones and 7 t-stats, without adding wiring? Not sure (assuming you’re in the U.S.) there are Z-Wave t-stats that are completely wireless.[/quote]
Well, couldn’t he just buy say for example some trane zwave thermostats, get some 24v wall worts to power them. That gets you the temperature reading to vera. Once you have that you can control the dampers and the A/C unit with the ‘real’ thermostat via Vera?
Thank you for the thoughts! Are there any multi-zone systems with the all of the controls and smarts built into the main zone controller? (Alternatively, can the Vera 3 emulate a zone controller?) It seems counter-intuitive to poll individual t-stats for status information instead of polling a single place that reports on all the zones… (The zone controller needs to know what everyone is reporting anyways.)
I have 5 zones with a Trane on each one with scenes to run them as a group or by there selves. Very wife prove cause she can change a tsat manually in a specific zone. area
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