Smart thermostats for electric baseboards in Quebec: why Nest and ecobee do not fit

Line voltage versus low voltage

Nest, ecobee and most thermostats you see advertised are low-voltage devices. They send a 24-volt control signal to a furnace or a central heat pump, and the furnace does the heavy lifting. An electric baseboard or convector has no furnace. The thermostat on the wall switches the full 120 or 240 volts feeding the heater. That is a line-voltage thermostat, and it is a different piece of hardware.

Put a low-voltage thermostat on a baseboard circuit and, at best, nothing happens. At worst you damage it. This is why so many Montreal condos still have the original dial thermostats from the 1980s.

What actually works

Several makers build smart line-voltage thermostats, and two of the best known are Quebec companies: Sinopé in Saint-Jean-sur-Richelieu and Stelpro in the Montérégie. Mysa, from Newfoundland, is the other name you will see everywhere. Between them they cover baseboards, convectors, fan-forced heaters and radiant floors, with models that speak Wi-Fi, Zigbee or Thread depending on the line.

• Mysa's baseboard thermostats handle 120 to 240 volts, loads up to 3,800 watts at 240 volts, and work with Apple Home, Alexa and Google over Wi-Fi.
• Sinopé makes line-voltage thermostats with Zigbee and Wi-Fi radios, plus floor-heating models, and its Wi-Fi line works with Apple Home.
• Stelpro sells thermostats matched to its own heaters, useful when heater and control come as a pair.

Check the wiring before you order

Most smart line-voltage thermostats need a neutral or a second live wire in the box to power their electronics. That means three or four wires, not the two that an old dial thermostat uses. Many older Montreal homes have only two. The fix is a short run of new cable, which an electrician does in an hour, but you want to know before a box of thermostats arrives. Checking every thermostat box is a standard part of our site survey.

Keep the schedule in the house

A Wi-Fi thermostat that stores its schedule in the maker's cloud stops following it when your internet is down or when the maker changes its terms. We prefer thermostats that talk to a hub in your home over Zigbee or Thread, with schedules and presence rules running on that hub. The thermostat still shows up in Apple Home on your phone. The difference is where the decision lives.

Do open windows and empty rooms matter?

In a home with a hub, yes. A window contact can pause the heater in a room that is being aired, and a presence sensor can drop the setpoint in a guest room nobody has entered in a week. Neither trick requires a special thermostat. It requires the thermostat and the sensors to be on the same local network, which is the whole design.