Smart thermostats and evaporative coolers
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By Big Tree
Hey all,
I'm putting together a plan to outfit my home as a smart home. I want to do this for a couple of reasons. First of all, I am an electrician and I'd like to make smart technology more a part of my business, as no one in my community does it. Second, I love smart technology and I want it! I'm looking for suggestions and tips as to what is going to be the best to not only outfit my home with, but is good to sell in a lower income market (nothing like crestron or control 4).
I think the essential things to put in to make a home smart would be heating control, lighting control, door control, as well as some control to bring them all together. Here are my current thoughts, and I'd love to hear what any of you think about these things.
Lighting - Lutron Caseta - I'm a RadioRa2 installer, but I don't have the money to put that into my house, so the next best thing for me is Caseta. I already have Caseta switches in my home and I love them. I sell them quite often already and I think Lutron is fantastic.
Heating - Ecobee - I like ecobee in theory because they aren't nest. Even though I'm a Nest Pro, I just have always liked the look and sound of Ecobee. Am I completely off my rocker for thinking that?
Door Control - August Lock with Ring Doorbell - Seems like these are the best things out there right now, but this is a category that I know very little about.
Central Control - I use Apple right now, so HomeKit seems to make sense, but I think I'd like to use voice control and so the Echo seems like a good product for that. Would a Google Home be better? Again, don't have much knowledge of this section yet.
Finally, I currently have an old Apple router, one of the old airport extremes, and I don't know if I should be thinking of upgrading my router in this process.
Thanks for reading my post, thanks for any input you give.
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By TimothyWMurray
I added 2 Trane TZ400BB3VZNNSL - Z-Wave Thermostats to my Staples Connect.
They were easy to add. These thermostats have no way to program them except through a zwave control. They have manual buttons, but no scheduling. That is fine because I have my Staples Connect and always intended to use it to schedule them.
I had two surprises when doing this, maybe someone has a helpful tip.
Staples Connect has activities. When setting these up you must choose scheduled or manual. Both of my surprises come from the interaction of scheduled and manual activities.
1) I set up a several scheduled activities with names like "wife working from home", "kids home from school", and "sleep time temperature" And each of these triggers at a set time on a set group of days of the week. I gave them names like this because I sort of expected that these same activities could also be triggered manually. Turns out they can not. I had to create essentially the same activities but in the manual activities section. A little extra set up, but this gets the job done.
2) I then set up a manual activity called "vacation temperature" in the manual activities. But if I run this activity, it will only run until the next scheduled activity kicks in. I don't think I can put the regular schedule into suspend mode.
I guess am mentally modeling an activity (temperature settings) as a separate level of abstraction from the trigger (manual or scheduled). This led me to assume a bunch of possibilities that just are not there in the Staples Connect.
Any help is appreciated. Would I be able to do what I'm trying to do if I had a different hub?
By the way I bought the thermostats from http://www.zwaveproducts.com/ and the have great customer service.
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By Dave
Just found a new visitor to the forum and this KickStarter. Very interesting as I have multiple AC Units and 3 zones. Some of my zones work better than others due to some funky duct and return air decisions. I wonder how this Embue system would work or help me out?
on KickStarter here: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1606462593/rest-easy-weve-got-your-hvac-covered
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