Experience with room / wall thermostat

Devices
1

Hi all, first of all, I would like to wish you all a great start into 2024!

I am currently considering to replace my old wall thermostats (bi-metal switch) with smart thermostats for a water based floor heating.

There are plenty of options out there, but before I look into the different offers, I would like to explore the pros and cons of the different technologies to connect the thermostat to homey pro.

I have seen devices that are based on WiFi, Zigbee or Z-Wave. Which technology seems to be the most reliable?

WiFi:
I just have replaced all my WiFi-based plugs from TP-Link because I often got “rate limited” errors with these devices. Those were replaced by IKEA Zigbee based switches -

Zigbee:
As a result of replacing the TP-Links I now have a lot for Zigbee-Repeaters across the house, so Zigbee should work quite fine.

Z-Wave:
I have two Z-Wave based devices connected to my Homey-Pro: 3-Phase Smart meters that I use to track energy consumption for the house and the warmth-pump.

My struggle now is to decide between the different technologies to get the most stable environment for my Homey.

Is this “rate limited” error specific to TP-Link or to WiFi-Devices in general? Z-Wave and Zigbee should work fine (I suppose) since they create their own mesh networks that cover the whole house.

Any thoughts would be very appreciated.

Kind Regards,

Kay

I know the (one) basic difference between Zigbee and Z-Wave is bandwidth available for transmission of data.

2

TP link specific. Make sure your wifi devices can function 100% without “the cloud”, like Shelly → Cloud connectivity is optional.
Your own wifi network doesn’t police you with ‘rate limits’ I may hope :wink:

I have a mix of wifi and zigbee devices, while I started out with a bunch of Tuya wifi stuff, and moving slowly to zigbee.
I don’t use z-wave, it’s just way too expensive to my opinion.
But as far as I know it hasn’t much chance of interference.

Keep in mind Zigbee and wifi can interfere. Also close neighbor’s wifi signals! Tune the channels with care.

3

Blockquote
TP link specific. Make sure your wifi devices can function 100% without “the cloud”, like Shelly → connectivity is optional.

That is a very good thing to know :slight_smile:

Blockquote
Keep in mind Zigbee and wifi can interfere. Also close neighbor’s wifi signals! Tune the channels with care.

Once I replaced the TP-Link plugs with Zigbee plugs, I needed to setup Homey from scratch. In this admin frenzy I switched all my WLAN-Repeaters to Channel 1 while Zigbee is using Channel 20

Thanks again for your feedback :slight_smile:

Kind Regards,
Kay

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