rs5th

What Zigbee thermostats do you have?

What all are you gonna use em for?

I believe there are a few Honeywell models that are Z-Wave, so that’d be fully local. I’m using EcoBee, which does have cloud control, but I’ve added it to Home Assistant via HomeKit, and that is local control. It’s a little annoying because EcoBee doesn’t expose it’s fan setting via HomeKit, so I can’t have HA kick on the fan when the AC isn’t running, for example.

It’s amazing, I think it still requires YAML config, which is a barrier for some folks. Also a bit annoying that it doesn’t have it’s own dedicated “restart” button like Generic Thermostat, so you have to restart all of HA for the changes to generic_hygrostat to apply.

Here’s what I did for humidifiers in my house:

• Dumb, analog-controlled humidifiers (like with the knobs, no digital displays, buttons, modes, etc)
• Local control smart plug (Tasmota flashed Sonoff S31 in my case, but it can be anything)
• Humidity sensor (I use the Zigbee Aqara ones)
• Create a Generic Hygrostat entity

Now you’ve got a smart humidifier in Home Assistant. You can set the desired humidity, and when the sensor detects it’s below this, it’ll kick on the smart switch. When it passes the threshold, it’ll turn off. It’s been great! My humidifiers shut off when the water level drops, so I can even use the power monitoring in the Sonoff switch to send me a “low water” alert when the humidifier should be running, but it’s drawing no power!

I can’t remember if I had to have an Amcrest account to set it up or not, as soon as basic setup was done, I blocked it from the internet. So it definitely doesn’t have to phone home at least after the setup phase.

When my current Unifi APs die, I’ll probably look at moving to MikroTik for WiFi. I’m still salty about them not supporting anything but their appliance.

I used Unifi Video for a long time until they moved away from letting me run the NVR on my own VM/hardware in the Uniti Protect world.

I’m using an Amcrest AD410 doorbell cam that I’ve firewalled off from connecting to the internet. I’m using it via Frigate in HA, but there’s a HA integration for Amcrest / Dahua as well.

Edit to add: I’ve been using mine for about a year. No issues at all, it’s warm to the touch not hot. Granted, I’m not doing any motion detection or anything on-camera.

For contact sensors, I’ve got like 20 of the Linkind door and window sensors. They’re Zigbee, and super responsive. I’ve basically built my own alarm system with them and HA. At ~$10 (USD) each, they were quite a bit cheaper than the comparable Aqara sensors.