Summary
My work to create a decent Blueprint for finding the right time and conditions to air out your house; and a script to make sending notifications to the HA companion app - with most of the device specific customisations, inc. notification priority and urgency - easy to both setup and configure from the UI.
So, after a conversation on Mastodon, and some inspiration from an article in The Guardian on the German practice of Lüften (house burping, or airing)… it prompted a useful thought and question.
The question was could I make use of my available sensors (co2, door/window contacts, temperature) and use notifications to give me a decent nudge (via push notification), to air my house out whenever needed - rather than checking the dashboard and going “Yeah, it’s about time I did that”.
For me - HA notifications and their settings had always been the bane of my living existence, and complex evaluation of entities has always left me scratching my head until recently.
What I’m sharing
So - with a little bit of help from my LLM friends (Microsoft Copilot - which worked rather well), and some very persistent iterative testing in my own HA instance to be 100% confident of my work - I was able to create the following:
- A blueprint for notifying when it’s time to open some windows
(Direct link to code with detailed instructions and documentation) - A reusable and device agnostic notification script to consistently send push notifications, where the HA companion app is installed on a target device and properly configured, and work on a better notify entity with decent UI to use doesn’t seem anywhere close to fruition.
I really hope some others in the community find this work useful, or it helps them in one way or another with some of the challenges or opportunities they’re facing.
Any if anyone has any feedback, I’m genuinely all ears 
What does the blueprint solve, and how does it help
- Send a time-sensitive notification for opening windows/doors to create a cross-breeze when CO₂ is sustained high AND outside conditions are favourable (cooler outside, wind direction/speed helpful), but only when someone is home, and with a cooldown to avoid spam.
- By being a blueprint, you can easily configure the devices you need for each sensor, and your local information, without needing to get down and dirty with the YAML constantly.
What does the notification script solve, and how does it help
- Deals with the nightmare of sending notifications in HA
- Accepts a variety of inputs and options (title, message, url, iOS/Android specific options - i.e. time-sensitive or critical alerts), and
- Sends to one or more notify services (device or group) for delivery via the HA companion app on the target device(s).
Documentation for these in abundance
All of them are documented to the best level I can, and include:
- Appropriate links wherever possible (both in code, or presented in UI), to help others understand and use it.
- For the blueprint, there’s even helpful information on how to get the compass bearings for your location to calculate when the wind direction will help you create a cross-breeze from one side of the house to the other
Example results and screenshots
Notification
Here’s an example of the notification generated by the script when the automation/blueprint is triggered:
Blueprint
Notification script
