I currently have a heating setup using Cadet wall heaters. Three of the bedrooms each have a single Cadet heating unit with its own Honeywell dial-style Thermostat. The living room, dining room, and kitchen each have their own Cadet heating unit and are controlled by one single Honeywell dial-style thermostat located in the living room. The two bathrooms have a single Cadet heating unit. While the unit in the kitchen is controlled by the thermostat in the living room, it and the units in the two bathrooms can be manually turned on/off.
It's working just fine, however, I'm curious if I could get and install a programmable thermostat which could control and schedule when the heat turns on/off in each room, separately based on the times that we're in said rooms. For example, having the temperature controlled in the bedrooms from 9pm to 5am (heaters would be on/off based on the temperature), but off in the living room (because no one is in there); while from 5am to 8am and 3pm to 9pm the temperature is being controlled in the common rooms.
- Can I replace the dial-style thermostat with a single thermostat,
which would also have remote thermostats in each of the rooms which
currently have a dial-style thermostat? - Does this type of thing
exist? - If so, am I able to change/upgrade my existing dial-style
thermostats with this type of thing?
Best Answer
Many thermostats make light(er) work
What you want isn't a single central thermostat. On the contrary, a key principle of proper building control is that parameters in a zone should be controlled by a controller in that zone, reading sensors local to said zone, and driving devices that control nothing besides that zone.
This means that the devices you want to install are individual thermostats, but with networked supervisory capability -- i.e. the ability to set the temperature and scheduling over a local network from a central point. This sort of use-case is where networked thermostats (there are several out there) excel; however, many of them are designed for more traditional 24VAC control systems used with furnaces and heat-pumps, not the line-voltage system used with electric wall and baseboard heaters like yours.
There are a couple of networkable line-voltage thermostats out there; most notably at the time of this post, Honeywell makes one for their proprietary RedLink wireless automation system (albeit without any type of API integration) and Casa makes the WiFi based Caleo. In addition, existing low-voltage thermostats such as the Nest can be used with line-voltage systems using a relay transformer combo such as the Honeywell RC840T or equivalent, although the RC840T's transformer may not provide enough power for some networked thermostats (such as the Nest).
Whatever system you go with, though, make sure you secure it from outside network access!