The house I bought ended up having a boiler that’s way oversized for the three separate zones that they put in, so it short cycles a lot. To try and avoid that a little bit at least, I would like to open the basement zone (turn the heat on) whenever the main floor ecobee starts to kick in. I would like to use the homekit integration so that I don’t have to rely on ecobee’s cloud.
I’m not sure how to do this at all to be honest because I’m really new with Home Assistant coming from smartthings.
Basically, I think the easiest way to do this may be to set the basement to a highish temperature on a trigger when the main floor starts heating and then revert to the original settings after.
Any assistance on my first automation would be nice 
Could you tell us the HA entity_id’s for the ecobee thermostats involved? Also it would be nice to see what their state & attributes look like.
I agree, probably all you can do is raise the set point temporarily. If you can post the details mentioned above I could probably suggest something.
Hi! Thank you for the response. The main thermostat is climate.main_floor and the other is climate.basement. I’ve been trying to figure out the best way to do this, and I discovered that the homekit integration doesn’t allow for ecobee presets, which I think means I can’t go back to the previous temperature after it’s been modified with homekit.
In this case I think I want to create a new preset within the ecobee app, then when the climate.main_floor switches to heating, change the climate.basement to an ecobee preset that has a higher temperature. OR I could set it to a higher temperature and then revert back to the preset it was on.
I don’t think you need to do anything with presets. You should be able, with things as-is, to create an automation that triggers when climate.main_floor indicates it’s heating that saves the current state of climate.basement using a dynamically created scene and raises the target temperature of climate.basement using the climate.set_temperature. Then create another automation that triggers when climate.main_floor stops heating (or some other appropriate trigger) that sets climate.basement back to what it was using the dynamically created scene.
Ah that’s an interesting approach. I had created a binary_sensor I was going to try and use in an automation but maybe I’m going about this all wrong…
heat_main_on:
value_template: "{{ states_attr('climate.main_floor', 'hvac_action', 'heating')}}"
friendly_name: "Main floor thermostat is calling for heat"
Well you could certainly use that in the trigger of your automation. (Or you could use the template directly in a template trigger.) BTW, you need to change states_attr in your template to is_state_attr.