Z-Wave Smart Thermostat - ZTS-500 with Your Z-Wave Hub

It basically works: it can maintain a temperature. It also connects to z-wave network. UI is very limited, but works. But its z-wave capability is almost zero. You can set the target temperature, that is it. No mode changes or anything. All commands are ignored. It does not report the target temperature. It does not report at all. It does not report any temperature. I had to enable polling for the sensor. Automatic reporting does not work, although I tried to enable it. There are two parameters, but they are ignored. It does not allow to get the target temperature. It does not report it either. Polling does not help. It says: not supported. Installation I have C-wire. I do not use batteries. Connected all wires easily. But there is no room for wires behind the unit. I have to cut/drill the wall to hide wires. Currently there is a gap between the unit and the wall. I am not sure what I'll do.

The best in battery eating. It uses 4 AA batteries and they last about 4 days. I have the C wire in my system, but could not for the life of me get it to work off of 24V from the furnace. I even purchased an Ecobee Power adapter, connected the R and C wires, and no power. I did change it to 24V mode after disconnecting from the Z-Wave hub, but it still would die as soon as I took the batteries out, so I figured, maybe they are only for backup. 3 days later my ZTS-500 was dead. No response to pressing buttons, so I changed the batteries, and voila it works again. So I do not know what is going on, but I ended up returning BOTH my units ( I purchased 2, because I have 2 furnace home). Now I have 2 Ecobee3 Lite, connected with the SAME C wires and they WORK without problems, on both furnaces. I thought I would have to use the Ecobee PEK kit after all the connection issues with Remotec, but didn't. So in my opinion it looks awesome, has the right features, everything can be setup thru the SmartThings app, but I couldn't install it on either of my furnaces...

Aside from a few minor quirks, this device is a great option for a Z-wave thermostat. Almost all pre-2018 Z-wave thermostats simply don't have encryption, which was a deal-breaker for me - the encryption on this device worked great out of the box for all command classes. You'll need to make sure your Z-wave gateway supports the device. It uses the standard Z-wave thermostat (and fan) command class, so most should be able to add support easily or support it as a generic thermostat - though some of the features exposed via configuration variables (low battery notification, filter change warnings) will need some extra integration. The only strange thing that I haven't been able to work around well is that the gateway can't "poll" the current temperature setpoint - it only gets updates on the setpoint command class from the ZTS-500 after it's changed (locally or by remote Z-wave command). My furnace has some electrical oddities - the 24VAC wire's voltage becomes inconsistent while the heat is in a post-cycle cooldown, which was causing the ZTS-500 to flicker and sometimes reboot. Adding AA batteries to the thermostat as a backup worked perfectly - the device no longer loses power when the furnace voltage has issues. As far as basic "thermostat stuff" - the temperature sensor seems accurate and consistent, the differential and swing options work well to configure the behavior of your HVAC. There's no scheduling capability (your Z-wave gateway will have to do that) - it's pretty much just a simple, dependable thermostat that exposes literally everything to Z-wave.

Touch screen case plastic gets stuck in down position often, causing temperature to ramp down to.minimum. Will freeze you out if you don't catch it happening... Internal relays to turn HVAC on/off are LOUD. Do not install in a bedroom! Thermostat does not have a minimum runtime or minimum rest time. So sometimes it will cycle your HVAC unit VERY frequently, which is extremely bad for the equipment. I will say the zwave connectivity worked perfectly, though.

After double-checking my wiring and jamming some AA batteries in the back, I can confirm that it's a good z-wave thermostat. I easily added into my Hass.io setup and can mangle my temperatures from my phone. The only gripe I have is that it's an oil magnet and is *very* clicky. Pretty minor complaints, overall, though.

I bought 5 of these devices for a mountain home that does not have any C-wire, nor any nearby wall plugs where I could have used a AC-to-24V adapter. I used brand-new, Duracell batteries into each on Sept 6, 2018. After 2.75 months, towards ThanksGiving in Nov 2018, one by one, these thermostats slowly "went offline". I came up to my cabin in the 2nd week of December. All 5 had gone offline by then. Sure enough, they all ran out of battery juice. And that's with each thermostat using 4 AA, brand-new duracell batteries. Just 2.75 - 3 months max! Wow. Luckily, I suspected that these thermostats may die too quickly, so in the basement rooms of this mtn home, I used the uglier Radio thermostats. Those still had plenty of battery juice left. Anyhow, I replaced 4 x 5 = 20 new duracell batteries again into my 5 Remotec ZTS-500 thermostats. They all turned back on, and I could control them again thru my Wink.