My Honeywell T10 is connected to my wifi, I use the Homekit on it with HA. But I setup a firewall rule in my router to block all outgoing internet traffic to a group if IPs. Then I added my smart vacuum, thermostat, printers, doorbell, etc to the group. It's a solid setup.
this post was submitted on 09 Feb 2026
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This was going to be my suggestion -
Isolate it in a VLAN, don’t create NAT rules for that VLAN. Just let it exist. Only allow inbound traffic from other VLANs if needed.
what if you just dont connect it to any wifi, ever? i also highly doubt you 'cant even get one now [without wifi]'
an analog thermostat is 20$ at home depot
Don't bother hooking it up to wifi, just let it run. My parents got one of those with their heat pump install and I never connected it to wifi. The heat pump itself has an exterior temp and humidity sensor it uses to manage defrost cycles. "They" are selling you bunk shit.
Also mechanical or basic programmable thermostats are still very available and whoever told you "you don't have a choice" is lying to your face. If you paid your own money for it, return it.
I figured ! Thanks,
Yeah, I don't mind its other features but i don't need it phoning home telling corporations my home air quality and temps. If I could block all telemetry and only talk to it with my device it may be cool. But nah.
My Ecobee thermostat -- which is reasonably usable without an Internet connection -- has one horrific flaw: the built in clock seems to drift by a minute per month, leading to my programmed schedules shifting ever so slightly.
I could have it connected to a dedicated IoT SSID and live in a VLAN jail so that it only has access to my NTP server.... or I just change the time manually every six months as part of DST.
I had this problem and I just re-created the schedules in home assistant, so the schedule is just controlled by my server now.
I have an Ecobee also and have blocked its access to everything except the ntp time server using pihole
Yeah I have a dedicated IoT wifi network for those types of random devices. They are isolated, so any device on that particular network cant talk to any other device. If they must communicate with each other, I will set up firewall rules between the two, but wont let them access anything else on the network.
If they need internet access, you can rate limit their speed to like 1kb/s and set their dns resolver to a pi hole to keep tabs on where they are phoning home to and block accordingly.
If you can configure that devices TTL, set it low to like 4 or 5, and increase by 1 if its having trouble reaching the necessary destination. Also, block access to outside countries, as you probably aren't needing remote management from the foreign motherlands.
A pihole should be able to block telemetry. At least it does for my TV
can i use mullvads dns to block all that?
I didn't think so. That appears to be encrypted dns over https, not dns lookup blocking for specific devices for specific ad/telemetry domains
Honeywell T6 Pro - Z-wave. No cloud or no wifi, humidity sensor, and fan circulation mode. Ebay has plenty. Upgraded from a wifi thermostat and have been really pleased. Worth the money.
You do need something like Home Assistant though.
My old wifi thermostat was locked down by Honeywell and useless except for manual control unless allowed Internet access.
you do need something like Home Assistant though
Wait.. So if the box running home assistant goes down.. Can you still change your heat?
Yes, it has full manual control from the touch screen. There's also a version that's a bit cheaper with some dedicated blister buttons.
Connect it to Home Assistant and you can do damn near anything with it. Wireguard allows remote access so we can monitor the temperature and control the heat & AC from anywhere.
If it has local control like a normal thermostat you can control it without a hub like home assistant