Wow, I hope my story doesn’t seem like I’m trying to stop anyone from doing anything. If nothing else I hope reading my story is empowering to others!

Also I’ve never heard of the “old green wire” problem, maybe you can add some details if it might help others?

I think you mean Matter over Thread?

I personally don’t have a Matter network at home but I run some Aqua ZigBee stuff and it works well.

I recall a while back Ecobee was blocking Home Assistant users, apparently by locking down api access.

A quick search tells me that they now have an official integration and are good with Home Assistant again.

That is truly good news! I had previously written this company off for being hostile to self-hosters but apparently have cleared their name.

Good luck! I imagine it will be really satisfying to restore full function and keep your data out of Google’s hands.

I agree and I’ve always tried to keep WiFi IoT devices to an absolute minimum. I have a couple dozen ZigBee devices that have been rock solid, and if my count is right I have 6 on the WiFi IoT network.

• Lay-Z-Spa smart control built on an Esp32
• A vintage fan that I replaced the internals including an Esp32 for remote control
• Two WLED Esp32 controllers
• A Govee controller
• And now the Nest

This feels like a reasonable number, and being mostly based on reliable Esp32 boards helps. With that said, I would absolutely urge anyone adding smart home equipment to look into ZigBee, ZWave, Thread or some combination.

My Zigbee devices have been reliable and have very low latency which is really important for things like lights / switches.

Good luck! We are on day 3 with it and it has been reliably following the schedule and responding to temporary overrides as expected.

Thanks for reading! I see posts like this every now and again and always wanted a reason to do one for myself. I’ve also been itching to be less of a lurker and make some posts here.

Great question and the answer is a combination of things. First, I got an absolute great deal on it, just $25 shipped. Second, I knew the hardware itself was really high quality. And lastly, I don’t have a zwave radio in my home (this far) and looking at the ZigBee thermostats seemed like a bit of a minefield. I do mention in the blog post that I was considering a Zen ZigBee thermostat and then when I found the super cheap Nest decided it was worth a try even if I later replace it.

Nice luck on the A/C upgrade! I’ll never I understand why a house this modern skipped out on running a 5+ wire cable.

I’m just gonna comment that Pink Floyd is amazing!

I agree, having lived through the old plastic covered LCD screens it would be nearly impossible to convince me to give up my gloriously durable tempered glass.

For some it stems from living through the early years of smartphones with single core CPUs, only enough RAM to keep one app open at a time, and interactions that were a complete choppy laggy mess.

Back then every new (non-budget) phone upgrade was a ridiculously big jump in performance. If you lived through that era it became a somewhat normal thing to do every couple of years assuming you had the means. I think many phone buyers today are still repeating that old behavior of thinking “OMG I can’t wait to use the next model that will be 5x better than this old one” but truly those days are long gone.

Now we look forward to only slightly (single digit percentage) increases in performance. And most new features get back ported to older models so you don’t even have a software reason to upgrade unless your model is no longer supported.