Smart thermostats seem to be one of the most important smart home devices: not only do they reduce energy consumption costs, they also work nicely with other smart home devices and sensors, offering many opportunities to create personalized scenarios adapted to a user.
A smart thermostat ensures a perfect temperature when you arrive home, and lets you control it remotely: from your couch, sitting in your office, or even traveling to another country. Set heating schedules easily and regulate your consumption to save money on energy bills. You may also connect your thermostat to a motion sensor and program it to turn off the heating when there is no movement inside your house.
Smart Thermostats: WiFi vs. Z-Wave
Many manufacturers of thermostats choose WiFi in order to be compatible with the largest possible audience, but the downside of WiFi is that the connection is not stable when you have over a dozen devices that use your network. In addition, there are no integration standards. This forces manufacturers to rely on cloud services as the backbone of their infrastructure. Using the cloud brings a lot of concerns about reliability, security, and privacy. What’s more, cloud services usually require a subscription (and those who do not may start just out of the blue).
If you are familiar with Z-Wave, you already know that there is a better solution than WiFi and the cloud: using a specific Z-Wave smart home hub that provides local control. "Local" means you’re sure that your data is secure and you don’t depend on some third-party company that may stop supporting their servers.
If you want to add smart lights, security locks, switches, shades, smart gates, and other cool gadgets that smartify your home, having Z-Wave is a big help. Adding more devices to the Z-Wave network makes it more robust and reliable. When there are several devices connected to WiFi, it becomes crowded and starts to slow down. In addition, WiFi devices are very energy-consuming compared to Z-Wave, which means if your sensors are battery-powered, WiFi is not really a viable option.
Each extra element in a Z-Wave network extends the connection distance and reliability. As a result, radio waves can "bend" around obstructions and have longer ranges. Due to its lower operating frequency, Z-Wave also works better when going through walls than WiFi or Zigbee.
Smart Thermostats by HELTUN
HELTUN offers two types of heating thermostats: the go-to choice is a classic Heating Thermostat HE-HT01 mounted on a standard power socket junction box. It’s the thinnest on the market, just 9mm off the wall, and provides users with a lot of customization options like different modes, time schedules, an embedded power consumption meter, and an opportunity to link it to the alarm output so the heating may be automatically turned off when the alarm is armed.
The second option is HELTUN’s High Load Switch HE-HLS01, which has two options of installation: as a binary 16A switch or as a heating thermostat of the same max load. High Load Switch may be mounted inside a junction box behind your regular ‘dumb’ switch or on a DIN rail inside an electric panel using an accessory adapter from HELTUN. High Load Switch provides absolutely the same functionality as Heating Thermostat in terms of heating control. The only thing it lacks is a screen, which means you can control it using your smartphone/app but won’t be able to physically push the buttons. High Load Switch is a great option to automate your heating if
(a) you don’t require a screen or you don’t want your customers to change temperature: It is useful for the hospitality industry or office premises, and
(b) you want to save money on installation: using High Load Switches is much cheaper, especially if you have dozens of them.