Heating pad, seedlings, smart plug help

Configuration
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Hey folks

I need some help germinating my tomato seeds. I have a regular old heating pad that thankfully turns on from sleep mode if power is cycled. But if it’s constantly on the temperature of my soil trays is too hot. So I need to run it for example maybe 15 minutes out of every hour, between 9pm and 7am or something. Bonus if I can add other time slots with varying ratios of on to off. Certainly there are times of day when the sun is shining in and the pad should be off.

I’m really only good enough with HA to do automations through the gui, but I can’t think of the elegant way to do this. Please give me your suggestions!
thanks

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How about adding a temperature sensor and implementing a generic thermostat for precise temperature control?

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That would be the ideal solution, but it would have to be a probe to get into the soil, and I’m more interested in this just working for this few weeks than I am sourcing one and getting that to work. If this year works out thats where I’ll probably aim for.

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Then the easiest way would be a time pattern trigger, on the hour, then a time condition to check it is after 9pm and before 7am. The action is to turn your heat pad on.

Another automation turns the heat pad off when it has been on for 15 minutes (state trigger with a for:).

You can template the on ‘for’ time to accept an input number if you want an easily adjustable on time.

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Thank you! I’m familiar with all the commands except time pattern. How would I get it to do every hour on the hour from the gui? Sorry, I did consult the documentation but the examples are never the complicated case, just the simple one.

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  trigger:
    - platform: time_pattern
      hours: "/1"
      minutes: "0"
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