Automated temperature control around target temperatures

Configuration
1

Hi!

First post, so apoligies in advance if I’m completely off the mark here.

I’ve just installed Home Assistant. I have a house with different sources of heat I want to automate.

My ideal target setup is something that lets me:

  1. Configure whether the house is occupied or not (e.g. vacation mode) based on Google Calendar.
  2. Set target temperatures. I imagine this being set in a dashboard.
  3. Configure behaviour for the different sources of heat. I currently have floor heating in some rooms and electric radiators in others.

I’m a bit confused as to what concepts in HA fits my use case best.

Some features I want to implement:

  • Variations in heating based on the current power pricing. E.g. reduce the temperature by 5 degrees for the most expensive hours during the day, increase it by 2 degrees for the cheapest.
  • Reduce temperature in the night time for electric radiators.
  • Reduce temperature when I’m away, but still vary heating based on pricing.
  • Start heating in advance when I return from travels. Different heating sources might benefit from different intervals for pre-heating.

So far my reading of docs indicates that:

  1. Creating the variables I want seem non-trivial. I haven’t found a way to create a dashboard for setting variables for use in automations.
  2. The Google Calendar integration will probably work well. I might even use calendar event names to trigger different heating behaviors.

Could someone point me in the right direction to get started? I’m unsure whether the best approach for what I’m trying to do would be an automation, a scene or a script. They all seem to kind of fit, but not quite.

For context, I’ve previously worked more than ten years as a developer, so I’m fairly comfortable with technology. But I’m not used to the amount of YAML config yet :smiley:

2

Hah, okay! So I just found the Helpers functionality. That looks to be a good start for what I want.

3

Start by reading this.

and then this

With this you can create profiles for your heating and call these in automatons, e.g. when leaving the house switch heating to away mode.

This can all be made very complex, but start with simple automatons and progress from there. Everything you ever think about someone will have done before, and chances are there will be integrations to help.

4

might be helpful:

To get that level of automation, I have a couple of template sensors that will bubble up the state of my windows and doors, and I also have a helper, which is a simple Boolean, to remember when the system was suspended or not. Because if the system was suspended by the automation, I clearly wanted to resume once all the conditions are met for it to resume.