Hello all, I am about to embark on building my first LinuxMCE system. I am very excited to get a system up and running. I am building primarily for climate control, lighting control, and security through Z-wave using the Tricklestar dongle. I have about 12 years experience working with Linux as an OS, so I am fairly comfortable in the environment. With that said, all else held equal I'd rather work with hardware that works out of the box rather than having to do lots of hacking and tweaking. I am hoping the community can point me in the right direction.
The house has radiant floor heat with five zones. I'd like to be able to set schedules for each as well as remotely increase/decrease the temperature (in Fahrenheit would be great...) I am looking at two different Z-wave thermostats, the GE Security IS-ZW-TSTAT-100 and the 2gig Z-STAT. I am looking for 1. any info or insights as to how as easy it will be to get these functional and 2. guidance on which one to get. Through e-bay, the GE one is literally half the price of the 2gig (about $250 savings across 5 thermostats.) While saving $250 would be nice, I'm also not going to sacrifice my time and sanity for that amount of money if the 2gig will be much easier to deal with. If someone would like to advise I look at a different thermostat all together, I'm open to that as well.
Thanks for any help.