Control a climate in your home with IP Thermostat
IP Thermostat offers the simplest way to control a temperature in you home. Just install it on your local LAN and control it with your web browser on your local PC. The IP Thermostat is compatible with most HVAC systems, so whether you have a gas or oil furnace or boiler, hydronic heating or central air conditioning, you’ll be able to integrate this single-stage heat and cool thermostat into your existing heating system.
The IP Thermostat allows to program each day in the year. So, you have amazing flexibility for $374.99. Additionally, the thermostat can send notifications in the event of required maintenance or hight/low temperature.
The IP Thermostat includes a passive 110 punch-down block which provides power to the IP Thermostats over the Cat5 wiring and easy patch-cable connectivity to your LAN switch or router. The Ethernet Power Adapter provides power and network connection for up to six IP Thermostats.
I have this (actually three of these) themostats. They are perfect for my what I was looking for. I got my first email notification of low temp this week, which thrilled me for some reason. 😉
There are a few things people need to think about when looking at this product. It requires more wiring. You can’t just throw it in replacing an existing thermostat. You must get a CAT5 wire strung. For you DIYer types, that’s a breeze, I imagine, but I wanted to be sure people consider this when purchasing.
I put these thermostats on my three hot-water baseboard zones and had the CAT5 run. My electrician spent around a day doing the wiring. Not that big of a deal, but you have to factor this into the cost.
Once it is set up, you are good to go. You assign a fixed IP address to the thermostat in seconds and then link to Proliphix’s website. From there, you create a user id and can gain access to all of your thermostats from one interface. Or you can log into each individually if you know the URL. Either option is easy.
I have mine set up with a setback schedule that gives me a lot of flexibility. I just wish I could add my two electric baseboard zones to the system! Maybe Proliphix will provide that thermostat next?!
Oh, and when you are hooking it all up, the POE patch panel that you end up buying is NOT a switch/router. You must connect 1 CAT5 wire to your router for each thermostat you have on the system. This isn’t really clear in the instructions I read (ok, sort of read). I ended up getting my electrician to hook the first one up and I installed the next two thermostats with the wiring they pulled for me.
My next project is to figure out if I can attach an outdoor sensor to one of the thermostats to I can see the outside temperature on the web without having that value being incorporated into the thermostat functionality.