I’ve been meaning to put something like this in my setup for a while, but definitely not this now! List of alternatives in the Custom Communication section at awesome selfhosted

I migrated from another ZwaveMe product to the ZWA-2 (which was a firmware related headache to get my network out of the ZwaveMe one onto it but fortunately finally got it resolved) on a QEMU machine under Incus with no problems but I understand the desire, and the ZWA-2 has been rock solid.

Have you seen this (experimental) project

https://www.home-assistant.io/blog/2025/10/13/portable-z-wave-with-wifi-and-poe/

I’ve not dug into it much other than being aware of it, but conceptually don’t see why it, or potentially one also leveraging a ZBT-1 or -2 couldn’t also be possible, if you’re prepared to tinker.

No experience of this specific model, but during the pandemic I bought a similar budget spin bike. Within the first few weeks, one of the crank arms (where the pedals attach) fell off so they replaced that part and a week or so later it happened again so they let me return it for a refund and I bought a Peloton that I’ve used multiple times every week since then.

The driver collecting it said they had lots of similar returns.

Looking on the Amazon reviews for your model, 509 reviews rated pedal strength as a negative with some reviewers talking about how they fell off.

If you plan to use it mainly as a coat hanger then it’s probably BIFL, but if you plan to ride it I’d say most likely not.

Peloton is a big commitment as it requires a subscription as well as the expensive hardware (although you may find a used one locally) but if you like it, the content can motivate and drive you.

Another poster mentioned Concept 2 and rowing - all the rowers in every commercial gym I’ve ever been in have been Concept 2, if you maintain them, in a home environment they can most definitely be BIFL.

Good workaround, thanks!

Yes that is correct I have a VPN connection available to my house on my UK internet connection for selfhosted services and a separate commercial VPN available from a major provider which I can use to route via a different country but I don’t believe I can easily have them both connected at the same time nor do I really want to always route all of my traffic overseas to work around a minor part my online experience

If you expect it to be flaky you could get one of those old school mechanical time switches with the clicky pegs (or a more modern digital equivalent) and just have it set to power down for 1 click, normally 15 mins, at 4am or whenever suits you - minimally technically complicated and guaranteed stability through planned instability!

Thanks for the recommendation, will give that a further look.

I have played with Pinchflat as mentioned by another poster. I’ve found that some of the ones that aren’t on YouTube, you can use AudioBookShelf or similar in conjunction with a vpn set to a non core country for the podcast, you can either remove or at least greatly reduce the ad inserts.

Have an experiment with that, I use a gluetun docker and link my ABS docker to that.

Here’s mine from Accubattery, running Graphene on Pixel 8 Pro

Its certainly doable, you just need to decide on where you want to start as a minimum viable product and tinker along as you go but ideally think far enough ahead about ideal situation so you don’t paint yourself into a corner and have to restart from scratch to get a certain outcome, although the Pi is pretty flexible for the power you’ll need.

I did this around 20 years ago (obviously not with a Pi back then) but as things changed I came round to the less hassle option of a phone and Bluetooth, particularly as I was often driving cars I couldn’t tinker with too much.

I had an implementation with a fold out 1 DIN touch screen which replaced the stereo and handled audio amplification etc and one with a stand alone hot plug 7" touchscreen. I had a reserve battery so that it stayed powered up for a short period of time after parking at home to do playlist and podcast synchronisation to my server in the house.

As other people have mentioned I was using Kodi and running audio from it as well as satnav etc. Mp3car was a good resource at the time.

I have a similar setup with 3 different heating elements, each with it’s own different brand controller (who knows what the previous owner was thinking!).

I swapped one out a few years ago for a Heltun which seemed to meet my requirements and is designed for exactly that. It is the older discontinued model running on 500 series z-wave, their newer ones run on 700 series.

I had initially planned to replace all 3 with the same model assuming it was good - I haven’t (as yet) - it was a pretty new product and it was a bit buggy which made me hesitant. I have wood flooring on top of the concrete slab/ electric blanket in two areas and it’s advised to not heat the wood up too high as it causes shrinkage, unlike under ceramic tile, and sometimes it would not respect the max floor temperature setting. I went back and forth with their support about it and they were very helpful, giving me beta firmware to flash etc and I worked around it.

For the last couple of years it’s been mostly stable and behaving. For whatever reason, it no longer lets me directly set the target temperature in Home Assistant which it previously did - I may need to dig into that as it would be handy sometimes, but I think it meets all of your other requirements, like on device manual control, no cloud, air temp sensor and floor sensor connection etc.

There aren’t that many products out there that fit the bill, I was particularly struggling with ones that would let me set the max floor temp sensor low enough when I was comparing the spec sheets a few years back.

Yes, if I switch instance to world then its static. Thanks for your work, really love Voyager!

I’m on Android using Voyager 2.19.4 from 17th November, and its working for me

Not OP but fully agree - I don’t enjoy video content so my personal block list would filter youtube.com and any of their shortened aliases like youtu.be and I personally would also filter x.com as if you accidentally click it you’ll likely get the you need an account to view this nonsense

Do you use docker for anything else self hosted? You should give it a try. I literally had not heard of grocy till I read your post but I self host other things with docker. I googled them, visited their github looked at their docker instructions - theirs downloading a docker compose file and lsio’s which gave a run option rather than compose.

I pulled up an ssh to my server from my phone and literally entered the run command from here just modified to have my preferred storage path.

docker run -d \
  --name=grocy \
  -e PUID=1000 \
  -e PGID=1000 \
  -e TZ=Etc/UTC \
  -p 9283:80 \
  -v ~/.config/grocy:/config \
  --restart unless-stopped \
  lscr.io/linuxserver/grocy:latest```

I then opened my browser to http://ip:9283 and was prompted with a username and password. I googled and found out the default is admin/admin. I now have grocy temporarily running on my server. If I want to run it permanently I'd include it in my existing docker-compose stack or create a new one with just it in it. 

I understand it's frustrating and you may not want to use grocy after all and someone might have a good alternative, but getting to terms with docker will make your self hosting life much easier - it took me longer to type this post than it took me to get grocy up and running with docker.