Thermostat/furnace/fireplace on two levels

[john18]

I'm looking for advice on how you'd handle this situation.

I have a thermostat on the main floor that controls a forced air system for the main floor and the upper floor. Since heat rises, the upper level is usually hotter, even when we close the upstairs vents. We also have a fireplace (with a fan) on the main floor, so I often use the fireplace to heat the main floor, and then the forced air system works less hard (since the main floor, where the thermostat is, receives some heat from the fireplace). This way, the upper level doesn't get overly hot, and people get to enjoy the nice fireplace.

The fireplace is automated with a Shelly relay, and I've hung the Shelly temperature sensor off of the relay too, so it has it's own sensor.

I might like to automate the two-level temperature control when we're home. What would you recommend?

My initial thought (and probably the easiest solution) is to buy an Ecobee thermostat, with a separate ecobee temperature sensor, and set it up so that in "home" mode the Ecobee thermostat only uses the upstairs sensor. So, the main thermostat will be controlled by the upstairs temperature. And then, use some hubitat automation to control the fireplace. The Shelly Relay has it's own temperature automation (turn on at one temperature, turn off at another) so I could set up some virtual switches, settings, and rules to enable/disable the Shelly built-in automation, and adjust the Shelly built-in set points.

Other options are:

1. a more sophisticated Hubitat thermostat program/app (instead of some ad-hoc rules to adjust the built-in shelly automation set points)

2. set up a Sinope thermostat for the fireplace, so people have a wall display they can see and a set point they can adjust.

3. Some remote thermostat display for upstairs, so that the temperature control for upstairs isn't on the main level. That is, rather than an eco bee on the main level thermostat with a remote sensor, find something that also has a remote display/control. (If I buy a Sinope for the fireplace control, I could redeploy the same Shelly relay to the location of the main thermostat, and control it some other way.)

What would you do? Thanks for any advice.

[rlithgow1]

Even easier is to put a virtual thermostat on hubitat and then use any temp sensor upstairs and use that to work the downstairs thermostat.

[john18]

Thanks. I put a "Thermostat Controller" app to control the main level thermostat from the upstairs sensor. Then, I added the "advanced vThermostat Manager" (it's on hubitat package manager) to control the main-level fireplace from the temperature sensor in the main level thermostat.

It seems to work great! But, I wanted a simple switch to disable the two apps, e.g. when I'm away and not here to monitor things.. I put in a virtual switch, and used rule machine to enable and disable the two virtual thermostat devices when the switch changes state. I've never "enabled" and "disabled" devices before, let alone devices that are actually apps. So, we'll see if it works.

[rlithgow1]

You should use mode manager to simply switch them off when you are away. You could tie that in with geofencing as well

[john18]

Oh yes I can simply turn off the "Fireplace Thermostat" using Mode Manager. Thanks.

But if I turn the "virtual thermostat" off, won't that also turn off the thermostat it's controlling? I need that controlled thermostat to go back into uncontrolled normal operation.