Thank you Andy for the amazing work!
I am trying to adjust your project to manage my Tado heating sistem from HA, most of the features that I need are already there so it’s a huge help!
Do you think it is possible to adapt this blueprint to use a different temperature in case the room is not occupied? I like to keep the temperature stable to 17°C the whole day and rise the temperarture when I am home and the windows are closed. I tried to use the parameter “minimum thermostat temperature” but it does not work this way, when the room is not occupied the heating is turned off. Any idea on how to implement this? Thank you in advance!
I am happy that the blueprint helped. I know is is hard to accommodate every need, so I hope you have success adapting it to yours.
‘Minimum thermostat temperature’ is the minimum setting the device can accept. You can use the “frost setting”, which used when there is no calendar event (or the room is unoccupied or a door or window is open). It is usually set to 5, but you could change it to 17.
Another method that should work is to have a continuous calendar event set to 17C all day every day. You can overlap other events with the current implementation. However, to make that work I introduced the 1 minute refresh, which I now realise runs down the thermostat batteries rather quickly. I am working on a release 2 that does not require this constant refreshing and want to add an ‘away’ feature (override everything when no one is in the house). I will think about how best to also accommodate a ‘background temperature’ feature.
UPDATE 26 Jan 24: following your comments and others I am working on a second release of Heating X that will feature
A ‘away’ switch that will cause all rooms to be set to a temperature specified for each room (the away temperature), without having to edit all the calendars.
An ‘background’ temperature input value that will be used when there is no calendar event - so you will not need 24 hour events. It is separate from the frost setting (effectively off), which will be used if a door or window is open.
A reprogramming of consecutive and overlapping events so that it will not be necessary to refresh every minute.
An optimisation of TRV transmissions to avoid duplicate instructions and thus save battery life (in release 1 this is rather bad with 1 minute refreshes!)
I would have a use case for this: I rent a couple of offices by the hour and add the bookings to a Google calendar. If I could use the same calendar to manage the warm-up schedule, it would be much better than having to use another calendar where I have the same events, but all starting X hours earlier.
In addition, automatically adding the heating period could bring some advantages in terms of the timing itself: if you look at the historical graph of a thermostat, you will clearly see that when the heating system is turned on, the temperature starts to be plotted on an exponential path influenced mainly by the initial temperature, the target temperature, the outdoor temperature, and some nonvariable coefficients that are typical for the specific room. With simple logic, it would be possible to calculate the timing based on historical data and turn on the heating system at the exact time it is needed.
Hi @AndySymons , great work !
Did you ever thought about using helpers instead the calendar/event function ?
In my opinion these helpers are easier to setup and to change ?
Do you mean they are not showing in the selection list at the time you create the automation from the blueprint?
This might be because the selector filters on the domain binary_sensor and you have your sensors in s different domain? If so, then you can fix it by editing the blueprint to use your domain or remove the filter altogether
Thanks for the compliment. BTW I am working on release 2, which will feature an ‘away function’.
I am using helpers a lot (and wish it were not necessary) but I do not understand what you mean by ’ the calendar/event function’. Could you explain please?
Thanks for the interesting idea.
First point is that although I use local calendars, the blueprint should work with Google calendars or any other calendar that Home Assistant maps to a calendar entity.
How you would use historical data to insert events into the calendar I have no idea (and it is outside the scope of my present develpment). Do let us know here if you find a way of doing that!
Hi, thanks for your work and that you share it with us. Last week I made it work here as well in two rooms, each with a Shelly H&T and an IR-Panel (one with a Tasmota plug, one with a Tuya plug). Nothing more (no window sensors, etc.). It worked well for a few days, so i put one to my daughter’s room, but since the day before yesterday it stopped working.
Schedule and Status are showing the correct info from the dedicated calendar, but IR-Panel is off. I do can manually switch in on, so connection should not be lost.
How to find out, what’s wrong? I did not change anything directly on Heating X stuff, i just added Waste Collection Schedule from HACS which also uses calendars, but they should not influence each other.
You would have to set up a test scenario and then look at trace in the automation created rom the blueprint.
If you are setting up test events in the calendar, remember that they take about 10 minutes to take effect, so you need to do it 10 minutes before observing what happens.
You may find it helpful during testing to put some of the helpers on the dashboard. You should anyway have ‘setting reason’. It is useful to have ‘manual override timer’ because then you can reset it rather than waiting two hours for it to expire.
