Doing Smart Home properly: beginner questions for a thermostat project

Hi,
I’ve dabbled with this stuff, but nothing major - just an Amazon plug here, and Kasa plug there and a Deco Home mesh network (5 nodes), along with a Hive on the main heating system.
But now I want to do things properly…
Main goal is to automate temperature control in my workshop/office building.
I understand I need a temperature sensor and a Hub, and that Kasa Plug…

But, can I put the hub in the main house, and then access the other parts via standard wifi ? I understand they use a different protocol (Zigbee/Z-Wave), but does that use the Wifi as a transport layer, or is it another network?

Welcome to the forums!

They’re all different things! But they only require one hub. Like 3 different vehicles, but they can all use the same station.

If you’ve got a wifi plug, then the information will be transmitted over wifi. If you’ve got a zwave sensor, then that information will be transmitted over z-wave.

What is zwave? I haven’t the faintest clue. I just assume it’s like a radio wave magically up in the air sometimes. I know that sometimes the signals get confused by walls or distance, but it doesn’t seem to be a dealbreaker.

And while I was looking it up so I could respond, I found this link :joy:: https://support.smartthings.com/hc/en-us/articles/208672926-Z-Wave-and-ZigBee-FAQ

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That gives you temperature monitoring not control. Depending how you plan to control the temperature dictates what devices you may need. What would be the main device that controls your temperature?

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Perhaps it would be best if you waited to respond until you had a deeper understanding of the question in a particular thread. Because honestly none of the above is exactly true and it just becomes confusing for everyone.

I’m not quite sure even where to start in addressing your post without hijacking this thread and getting away from the original questioner’s project.

So if you would like to learn more about the communication protocols that are available to someone using the Samsung smartthings platform, why don’t you start a new thread and we can talk about that.

The shortest answer that I can think of is that a hub is just a plastic box that has one or more radios inside. Plus a little computer to manage everything. The number of radios and which protocols/frequencies they use is up to each individual hub manufacturer.

So it’s not necessarily true that you would only need one hub. It depends on the specific radios that that specific hub model has.

Anyway, we can definitely talk about all of this more, but just not in this thread. :sunglasses:

Z wave is one network, zigbee is another network, and Wi-Fi is yet a third network.

Some home automation platforms manage all of those with one hub, others require multiple hubs.

The first thing we need to know is the specific model of the thermostat that you are intending to use. Really that’s the first rule of home automation: “the model number matters.“ :sunglasses: