ESP8266 Community Forum

I've build a home thermostats system with PIC18F27K42 in each thermostats with LCD, for 5 rooms, 1 master in kitchen and 1 server in the basement, working on a bit-bang i2c. The server only send data to i2c at every seconds as it have a RTC (Chronodot) plus freezer and external temp sensors. The kitchen has a bigger LCD and can send data to the server to send to a dedicated or all thermostats using an ID in the data stream. I have read some docs on the net and bought a ESP32 DevKit V4 with WROOM-32D (changing later for a WROOM-32U external antenna for the downstairs server) and 6 ESP8266 ESP-01S module to include in each thermostat. My goal is to use the wifi instead of the i2c. So I'd like to have some guiding on how to achieve this. Maybe later I may use this wifi to use internet to change some settings in one or all thermostats. But for now do I really need to use the house wifi or can I use a kind of "thermostats wifi", separate from the house one, mostly for heating security. If so, how can I do that, since I'm kind of new to network and wifi. Many thanks to all.