I was about to commit to buying an ecobee3 since my power company has a sale.
Then I read posts about it, and I’m not liking the whole cloud based communication. I bought the Hubitat to stay local.
I’ve seen mentions of zen thermostats, and Go Control. Either is fine except they don't have smart sensor accessories.
What options do I have?
Non-cloud based communications. At least have an option to go non-cloud. Yes, I know about the ecobee + apple homekit. That is plan-B.
Can work with a temp sensor either through hubitat, or connected directly (wirelessly) to the thermostat. So I can put that sensor near my hot/cold spot.
optional - programmable from the thermostat device.
optional - I have 2 zones in the house. If one thermostat can control both, great. If not, I’ll buy 2.
A few months ago I got rid of my Nest and purchased a Honeywell T6 Pro and have been very happy with it.
Initially I was using Zigbee temp sensors (connected to Hubitat) to create an average and set the thermostat based on that, but a couple of weeks ago I hardwired 2 remote temp sensors and it's been working great. The hardwire option is more work but it's nice that it "just works" and doesn't require any programming.
I begrudgingly purchased the ecobee simply because of the remote thermostat option. I have had a large temperature swing in our bedroom as the thermostat was in the hall.
Their remote temp sensors work great and because they measure temperature where the issues (as opposed to repeatedly resetting the thermostat through Hubitat) the performance is good. (as in bad, fair, good, great).
I do not need a schedule as we are retired and now with the covid we keep the temperature the same all day. The result is we don't need the cloud.
Caution: If you purchase from you power company double check there is no requirement to let them monitor / control your thermostat.
My power company asked us to "join" their network. We opted out.
I use homekit controller on Home Assistant to get full local access to my Ecobee (I have 4 of them, and many remote sensors). Then I pump the data from HA into Node-red for any automation/other uses, but the HA data could go straight to Hubitat via MQTT as well.
I will say that the format of the data when it comes in via homekit controller is a real pain in the arse to parse/use. But it is there, and all local.
