Hey everyone, I’m been a user of Home Assistant for a few years now and starting to get into some of the meatier pieces of my set up, this one is about my thermostat. I’ve done a ton of googling, watched YouTube and other videos, checked some Discords briefly and either no one has my extra special use case or I’m just blind and can’t see the solution. I’ll try to keep it as short as possible.
Basically, I hate cloud APIs and I want to avoid them with a passion, partially for security/privacy reasons, but mostly because you can’t really trust a closed-source corporation to keep their API consistent or open over time, there’s always breaking changes. I have a Nest thermostat currently that I inherited from the previous homeowner that controls my only source of heating/cooling - my central air unit. For a while, I couldn’t even integrate it into HA because Google blocked the Nest API from new integrations, but it finally became available again from Google, and I set it up after a ridiculously long and complicated process I barely got through. And even after all that, if you issue more than ~3 API commands in a minute or so from HA, Google just tells you “too bad so sad I’m not going to do that” (I don’t do it often, but still, it’s annoying).
Short version, I want to ditch the Nest and any anything like it, ie APIs that tell me I can’t control my thermostat exactly how I want to. If I have to deal with a cloud API and ditch a small piece of privacy, so be it, but I want it to work properly and not tell me I can’t do something. While I was at it, I wanted to add a feature that wasn’t already in the Nest thermostat: the ability to take a weighted average of temperature sensors around the house use that as the target heating/cooling temperature (rather than just the one at the thermostat).
After watching this video from Dr. Zzs, I was inspired to go the DIY route for maximum customization/usability:
- Use a multi-port wifi relay (a Sonoff 4CH Pro 3 flashed with Tasmota) to actually trigger the furnace/AC/central fan in the actual furnace room
- Recode pieces of the
generic_thermostatintegration in HA to work how I need it to (IE, control heating, AC and fan only all on the same lovelace card, rather than just AC or heat) - With temperature sensors already connected to HA, create a new sensor to take a weighted average of those sensors for the target temperature (the Aqara Zigbee humidity/temperature/pressure sensors have been awesome for this), and then set up some automations to run the furnace/AC when needed.
- replace the physical thermostat with a tablet running the HA app so I can control not just the furnace/AC/fan operations, but the whole house.
This HACS repo is the closest thing I can find to what I’m wanting, but it’s missing the ability to control the central fan independently of the AC/heater. I could try to put fan control in by forking and editing the repo and loading it into HA as a custom repo, because I know HA has the capability to do this separately (my Nest has the option), but I’d have to educate myself on integrations within HA and I’m not sure I’m that good of a programmer or if I want to be a code maintainer. Maybe I’m making too big of a deal out of this, because based on my research, Ecobee thermostats do about 99% of what I’m wanting to accomplish anyway, I’d just have to buy their sensors instead and lock myself into a corporate overlord.
Anyway, my question to everyone is this: is there anything relatively pre-coded out there closer to what I’m wanting for American central air units I can tweak? Or am I going to have to code this myself from that HACS repo I found (or possibly go corporate if I’m not good enough lol)?
