Like most people I wanted to get a smart thermostat. So I bought a Nest thermostat. When I bought it was $250. I was not educated yet in the correct way to do smart climate control so my wallet took a hit. My wife liked the fact that she could ask Alexa what the temperature was and set it to whatever she told her.
Then came armageddon for our thermostat and it didn't work anymore. I tried and tried using different methods to get it to integrate into HA. I finally gave up. I sold the hockey puck and moved on.
I asked Facebook and various other forms about what to do. Everyone likes EcoBee. Well there is another two hundred or so dollars for a thermostat. I did like the fact that they have their own sensors and you can also use them for presence detection. But there again is that price. Trying to convince my wife to drop another couple of bills on yet another thermostat was not happening .
Then came a forum post about this thing:
It is a centralite Pearl. It is a zigbee thermostat. Now at first I didn't have a damn clue about how to get it in to HA. I had it paired and it showed up up as a entity but it only showed it as a switch for just the fan. Well I was defeated again thinking I was done. But I was looking at my entries one day and there was this entity that said climate. Well I went to my developers section and there was a climate device that controlled the heat and AC. We are in business!!!
When I got this thermostat it was $25 dollars it was an open box but had not been used. So I got a thermostat for ten times less than what I payed for my Nest. I looked last night and there were at least three for sale on ebay for less than $30 dollar each.
Now there are going to be haters, "well it's not a smart thermostat and Zigbee sucks", "and it's not this and that". Well for those of us that know it's not the thermostat that is smart, it's the automations and scenes that we make, that make it smart. Plus it adds strength to my Zigbee mesh.
I didn't have to add anything to my Yaml for it initially. I tried a "Nest" like card for my Lovelace view and I didn't like it, I was still bitter, Nest is a four letter word in this house now. So I used this climate card:
I have not tried any Z Wave thermostats but I figured as long as you get it to pair with HA it should be the same setup.
So if you are like me and you are post Nest armageddon and don't want to spend a lot of money this is the option I went with and I am more than pleased. I mean your thermostat is not a fashion statement or a status symbol.
My next step is some Node Red flows to make it Super Smart.
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