Thermostat of choice?

Hello all, was installing some new thermostats in a family members home for their HVAC system. Using a Vera Plus there, what are your guys’ thermostat of choice? I’ve seen a few Honeywell wifi ones for sale, anyone have any experience with them?

I’ve used a WiFi Honeywell thermostat for 4+ years and been pretty happy. Their app is good.
Now connecting it to Vera is another thing. You are going to rely on the community plugin. This works pretty well, but an official integration would be preferred.

The Venstar ColorTouch T7850 and T7900 are really nice thermostats with pleasing UIs and WiFi. It has a local API that can be enabled from the thermostat’s settings screen, and can then be used with (my) Venstar ColorTouch plugin.

Edit: I know a lot of people like the Honeywells, and they are great thermostats, but that cloud API is a non-starter for me.

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Yea I’ll have a look into those, trying to limit as many cloud devices as possible. Is your plugin published?

Yea an official plugin would mean it’ll ALWAYS work, too many times cloud based devices change their protocols and the community based plugins stop working

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Yes, it’s published in the Vera App Marketplace and AltAppStore (and it also runs on openLuup).

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I went with the Honeywell T6 Pro Z-Wave. I avoid Wi-Fi devices. The thermostat is great - has all the features one could want. The Vera interface is a bit lacking. I can’t find a way to determine if heat is being provided by the heat pump or the oil burner backup. I’d like to be able to monitor heat pump vs oil burner efficiency at various outdoor temperatures.
One other feature of this thermostat (and another reason I chose it) is the ability to connect an outdoor temperature sensor. Input from this sensor determines when to switch from heat pump to auxiliary (emergency) heat.

Zigbee Thermostat…we will be investing heavily into this …I am putting this out there for future reference.

I’m able to do this with my WiFi Honeywell and have one connected. Unfortunately, the only place it displays is on the thermostat itself. Not within Vera, SmartThings, Wink, Alexa, Google Assistant, or even the official Honeywell app.
Are you able to view this anywhere with the Zwave setup?

The Venstars do this as well, but they use a weather service for the outdoor temperature. That’s good and bad, I suppose. On the good side, there’s no battery to manage or wiring to a remote sensor if powered. On the bad side, clearly weather APIs require Internet access (so that feature is cloud-dependent), and during an extended outage during a deep cold snap, I’m not sure what the thermostat would do.

No - I have not found a way to do that.

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Venstar has external WiFi outdoor thermostats available that include with the Colour Touch series and others.

I am using Venstar ColorTouch T7900, I am using it from 6 months and really its working very well, I bought it from ReeCoupons and still there is no issue in it, there are many other models are available, if you wanna buy you can check there.

Hello I’m looking to replace a Secure SRT321 zwave battery Thermostat that is paired with a secure 2 channel receiver @tinman how are you getting on with these Honeywell T6 Pro Z-Waves?

Is there anything else worth considering for use here in the UK
Thanks

The thermostat seems to work just fine controlling heating or cooling. The only issue I have is not being able to determine if when heating if it is emergency heat (oil burner in my case) or not (heat pump). I don’t know if one of the device variables will indicate this or not and I haven’t had time to spend investigating.
This is probably the only Z-wave thermostat that I could find that includes an outdoor temperature sensor which is key for determining when to use emergency heat (too cold for heat pump to be efficient).

Ok Thanks, any other suggestions for zwave battery thermostats please

I also have the Venstar Color Touch. Love the thermostat although the plugin does not work with the mobile app. Can’t even see the temp or anything. I still have to use the Venstar app on my phone to control it without a laptop.

great thank you

I’ve been happy with my several Ecobee thermostats, with the best features being how it integrates with various home automation platforms (begrudgingly, Vera, despite the well-known failings of the Ecobee plug-ins thus far). Love how I can review my home’s particular usage patterns in the app and online, not to mention that I believe its extreme customizability (including remote sensors) has saved us plenty of money.

On the down side, Vera loves to forget how to control the Ecobee every time app registration gets lost, which is random and often. And the ezlo variant shows very little promise at this stage. Not everyone in the family appreciated the ability to “Speak to ecobee via Alexa” either, since it results in frequent temperature changes and high utility bills for a while.

I actually just went back to my Trane thermostat and ditched the Venstar. A few reasons for that but decided in the end I wanted a true Z-wave thermostat instead of an inet based one with a plug in. I can now see and control the thermostat on the vera mobile app again.