I don’t need anything that “learns”. I work from home and I’m always here so I just choose to change the thermostat to make me more comfortable as needed.
Any opinions/advice?
My ultimate goal with it would be to get some “smart” vents and thermostats that would allow me to create virtual zones so I can cool the room the people are in or cool one room and close the vent in the other as my wife is always cold. That kind of thing.
Baby steps for now as I’m just trying to get the pieces together.
Lowes sells one. Radio Thermostat ct101 (i think thats the model) but i have had it for about a year now and it works so well i don’t think i’d want another.
I have two wiFi ecobees, and while there’s nothing wrong with them, they are cloud to cloud. If I had to choose again, I’d go zwave/zigbee, and the dumber the better, and run them straight from ST.
2 CT100’(heating 2 zones) and Ecobee3 for Central AC. If you are going the CT100 route, make sure you have a common or get a 24vac adapter 'coz if you use its radio, you better have a cheap source of batteries. It will drain like crazy but these are nice though. If I had the money, I would have gone with Ecobee3 for all of them.
Note: CT100 does not require a common and can run on 4 batteries. Will not be a zwave repeater in that case. Run it with Common, and you have a zwave repeater.
I use this same one and it works wonderfully for my needs. I run mine on batteries and i rarely have to change them. I’ve been meaning to put a transformer on it, but haven’t felt the need to yet.
Mine dropped to nearly 60’s within few weeks. But I do pull the humidity and temps pretty often. And battery once in 8hrs. I got the adapters but yet to connect it. The smallest you can find is the lockstate connects with attached 20 feet wires. 101’s are I think same as 100s but Lowes branded (and looks better).
I kid you not. It couldn’t have been 40$. Some other model may be? I had checked Lowes before buying the CT100 and it was 99.99 at the store too…did it include the Zwave module or did you have to buy something to attach to it?
I personally think that the upcoming Keen Home vents are the best product for the price at the moment given the fact that they include a pressure sensor to avoid damaging your HVAC in case of excessive air pressure in the vents (if you close all of them for example). They are a bit expensive although there is a special pre-order discount going on right now, see this thread:
Bye for now.
P.S. You can contact Nate from Keen Home if you have additional questions about smart vents.
Everyone who has posted to this thread probably already knows this, but in case any new people happen to come across this in the archives, you can always check the official “works with smart things” list to see what specific thermostats or other devices have been tested as compatible with smartthings.
Make sure you check the tiny notes under the I to the far right of each device, because in some cases only some features are supported.
If the device is not on the official list, there still may be community members who have it working with smartthings, you can always check the forums.
Or a better way that I have found it to do a simple search on ST Community to see if the thermostat is supported by one of the developers who has made a device for it. Many devices on ST are supported, but not fully supported by ST and have much better support through the people who are using ST and creating the devices before we get an official ST device.
In other words, it may not show up on the lists as supported. But someone in the community has created a device fo support it on the ST ecosystem.
Just looking for clarification…do you run this thermostat complete with the wifi module on batteries alone? It’s getting no power from your heating system? The reason I ask is that a friend bought the same(?) unit from LockState and it just burned through batteries without the external transformer attached. I installed a NEST which meets his needs well and I have the old thermostat in the closet. I’d like to use it, but don’t want to look at the transformer wire running down the wall.
I bought the zigbee module and wonder if it uses less power than wifi.
