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Hi! I am running Umbrel on a Raspberry Pi 4 and I have “Home Assistant” installed in it, I oly have some smart lights connected to it. I would like to integrate a Thermostat with HA. But I am a bit overwhelmed with the different types of connections (Z-wave, Zigbee, Wifi, …)

Do you guys have any kind of recommendation, what connection is better? I would like to keep it local (or connecting remotely via Tailscale) but I would like to avoid any cloud or third-party server solution.

What thermostat hardware can I buy?

Depends on what you’re controlling and your geographic location.

GoControl GC-TBZ48, 6 years and running, not a single issue. ZWave.

Definitely Zigbee or Z-wave instead of wifi. Once you start to build out more devices you will be glad to not have gone down the wifi route.

I went with Zigbee and have Sonoff SNZB-02 temperature and humidity sensors in each room that have been absolutely flawless since the day I installed them, and they last about two years on a single battery!

I would obviously recommend them but I don’t have any experience of other thermostats or of Z-wave.

I did also install smart Zigbee TRVs on each radiator but I don’t rely on the internal thermostats of them as they don’t accurately represents the overall room temperature.

Nest Thermostat Gen 1 or Gen 2 running NoLongerEvil firmware. You can pick up a gen 2 on eBay for 20-30 USD. It only takes 5 min to load the and there is a HA native integration. Rock solid hardware with no cloud, no google, and it works great with HA. Note that the gen 1 and gen 2 are pre Google buyout of Nest. There is also a cloud hoisted dashboard if you want BUT there is self-hoisted docker and HA only versions as well.

https://nolongerevil.com/

@orosus

i use a hive thermostat & a variety of radiator valves (hive, aqara, sonoff), all #zigbee & compatible with #homeassistant through the excellent #zigbee2mqtt.

https://www.amazon.com/Honeywell-Home-TH6320ZW2007-Programmable-Touchscreen/dp/B0BHTQF8NL

That is the one you want. Honeywell t6 pro Z-Wave version, specifically that link which is the newer Smart start version.

Z-Wave is 100% local, not Wi-Fi, and secure.

I use these in my house and couldn’t be happier.

I think you can use home kit ones locally… which really broadens your options

Another vote for this option. I’ve had mine for three years and it’s been rock solid. I’m not using the built in schedule, I’m controlling everything through HA

They’re all generally fine. WiFi thermostats open up more security holes than the others because they are designed to be chatty. I have an ecobee WiFi thermostat that’s isolated to only talking to HA locally using the HomeKit integration, which is fine, but I can’t say I’d recommend it.

When I set up my thermostat the ZigBee/Z-Wave options were quite frankly ugly and had limited wiring compatibility. Nowadays there’s a bunch more options on the market - you should be fine finding what you need anywhere.

ZigBee/Z-Wave/Thread are all pretty comparable, so I’d go with whatever you already have on your network - me personally I’m all in on ZigBee right now so I’d probably get one of those.

If you’re undecided, HA newest official hardware supports ZigBee & Thread so I’d go with one of those.

The other recommendations are good, but please please double check your tstat wiring and/or HVAC system to ensure they are compatible. One of the few stats that work with my system without shenanigans is the Honeywell T10 Pro (which also worked out of the box with HA). This required me to rewire the control run to use it, and is not something I would recommend for people who aren’t prepared to cook the control board on their furnace if they do an oopsie or regularly read electrical diagrams.

And another vote for it. It’s been great. The only thing I miss is it doesn’t have multi-speed support but most setups don’t have multi-speed motors anyway.

The house I bought had one of these installed already. Works great with the homeassistant ZWA-2 antenna.

I second that solution. I’ve built the same setup for my home last Christmas, even tried different brands of TRVs to see which one I like. Works perfectly well with a Raspberry Pi with Home Assistant. The only issues I ran into were my lack of experience.

I like this one but I’m not sure why a $5 microcontroller, 4-5 relays and a screen costs so much. And it’s not even a great screen. I kinda like it to be more of a full color LCD screen. Just my opinion.

Wait what?!?! I have two gen 2 nests and there’s third party firmware?!?!

I’m currently using a Meross thermostat as it was relatively cheap: https://shop.meross.com/collections/smart-thermostat/products/matter-smart-thermostat-mts300ma

Currently using the meross_lan (https://github.com/krahabb/meross_lan) integration to make it work because my LAN doesn’t support Matter.

Nice 👍

Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:

[Thread #141 for this comm, first seen 7th Mar 2026, 02:50] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]

If you’re just starting to build out, what about using thread instead of zigbee or zwave?

Welcome to the world of electronic gadgets. You’re right there’s nowhere near $100 worth of hardware in this thing. I’d also love a color touchscreen. But I’d rather a color touchscreen that I could integrate in HA than one running some proprietary cloud connected ThermostatOS.

You could do that yourself- put an old tablet on the wall, run power to it, then get something like a zooz zen16 multi-relay or an ESPHome relay board to drive the hvac. Then the thermostat becomes a totally software defined virtual thing in Home Assistant that pulls data from a temp sensor in the room and controls the HVAC as appropriate.

Well Thread allows devices to require internet connectivity to pair. It also allows devices to fetch firmware updates from the manufacturer. And it allows features to be locked to their specific app. Thread and Matter are more complex to setup self-hosted style; it makes no difference when you use official hubs though. Thread doesn’t have many device types and manufacturers available.

Zigbee does not require or work over the internet, no trust required. It is very easy to setup self-hosted. There is a Zigbee everything made by everyone from large companies to random brandless places.

Zigbee is my preference as a result of the internet connectivity requirement. I do not trust random manufacturers to not brick my devices when they go out of business or choose to release a competing product.

+1 for ZigBee - if cost is a factor you can get really cheap ZigBee devices from AliExpress and the like - $10 or less per temperature sensor. Z-wave requires certification for all devices supporting it, so they tend to be more expensive and more limited in variety.

Blakadder’s ZigBee Repository is a great resource for verifying device compatibility with your chosen ZigBee integration - ZHA or Zigbee2mqtt. This might depend on your coordinator choice, as some (such as the Home Assistant Gen 1 usb-drive ones) only support ZHA, for example.

For a coordinator, the Home Assistant brand ones are reportedly quite good, especially the second gen one. I personally use a SMLight SLZB-06, reasonably priced and supports power over Ethernet, so I have it wall mounted centrally. I also have my home assistant instance running in a separate building, so something that works over IP was a must.

I use ZigBee and have lots of the sonoff trv’s. I tried a few Chinese ones and definitely DO NOT recommend.

Buy the sonoff ones, they still get firmware updates after two years. Batteries last about 1 year in my experience which is good too

Same. They are great.

I’m using a Drayton Wiser thermostat, which uses WiFi but has a fully local integration via HACS. Has worked great for me so far.

This is what I installed last year after I got an open box model online for a significant discount. It was easy to set up and works great with HA.

I probably would have gone with zwave or thread but zigbee is always way cheaper. Maybe someday the others will come down in price.

Well that leaves me with mixed feelings.

Thread itself doesn’t need Internet connectivity, but thread seems to almost always be paired with matter, which does (during provisioning).

I like that matter provisioning requires verification of their certificate, but I don’t like that certificates can expire or the certificate authority can shut down. Although maybe that’s all taken care of by the DCL? In which case that’d be fine.

In theory, Home Assistant could also give users the option to ignore certificate checks.

I also haven’t seen specific details on whether Home Assistant’s implementation allows sensors to contact the internet by default or what setting changes this.

It’s just foggier and less user focused by design in my opinion. But as one would expect when Google and other large corporations were the ones to develop it,

I like that matter provisioning requires verification of their certificate, but I don’t like that certificates can expire or the certificate authority can shut down. Although maybe that’s all taken care of by the DCL? In which case that’d be fine.

It’s also pretty obnoxious that it requires an Android phone with Google play services enabled (and even a google login IIRC) or an iOS phone. There are ways around this, but they are pretty complex and not well documented.

I’ve recently started with home assistant on a pi as well. Today I have 2 zigbee relay for my lights from Sonoff, 2 zigbee fire alarms, 1 wifi plug from Shelly and 3 Ikea remotes working on Matter over Thread.

Basically, any protocol you want to support other than wifi and Bluetooth will need a dedicated radio device. Luckily they are all pretty well supposed with home assistant. I have 2 Aeotec Zi-stick, one for Zigbee, the other flashed with OpenThread firmware (that’s for Matter over Thread, it wasn’t a good idea to buy twice the same device, I had to work around this issue). I don’t have Z-wave devices today, as I noticed they tend to be more expensive that the zigbee equipment. The new IKEA smart devices are very competitive in terms of price, they all work on Matter over Thread protocol.

In the end, you don’t need to choose. You can support all these protocols on the same raspberry pi. It’s just a matter of adding the corresponding radio and integration in home assistant.

My understanding is that that is because Google and Apple want to onboard it to their own home automation platforms, and HomeAssistant just piggybacked on that because it was easier, and it hasn’t been a priority to rewrite it. But this is based on a few old threads I just looked up, I’m not exactly an expert.
I think there was some talk about Bluetooth onboarding, but that’d require the devices to have a Bluetooth radio, which is more expensive that a QR code sticker. Idk if anyone uses it.
Having something like a WEP button would certainly be nice though.