Hello everyone,
First thing first, please bear with me as I’m new to HA, coming from Jeedom. I’d like to do the switch mainly because of the GUI that I really love on HA! Keep up the great work on that, I’m impressed!
So far I have been able to set up light switches, maps, geofences, cameras, MQTT, temperature and humidity measurements and an external database… I’m pretty proud of myself 
Here is the thing I’m fighting with for a while now: how do you guys manage your thermostat to work in automatic mode when you have heat / cool / away and a schedule during the day? I haven’t found anything on the web that would put me on a lead… I tried the dual thermostat that seems to do the thing for auto cool and heat, but how can I change the target temps when I’m away? Same question for the schedule, I tried HACS Scheduler component, but can’t get it to work with the Dual Thermostat…
Let me know how you did it, I can’t be the only one with this problem! :- 
I just have a bunch of automations. I’ve split my automations into separate yaml files inside an automations folder, so mine are all in a file called climate.yaml. A few tricks I’ve picked are:
- Use
input_boolean's in conditions to tell certain automations when they should and shouldn’t run. E.g. “winter_mode”, “guest_mode”, etc. which I toggle on and off via UI. - I’ve got a basic time-based schedule that sets the thermostat to a set temperature and mode (in winter mostly) - triggers are time of day - off at night and back on around 6am, condition is “winter_mode” as we don’t need a schedule outside of winter (we keep AC off apart from the solar-triggered cooling mode below)
- I’ve got another set that turns the heating off when people are “away” and back on again when people get home. Presence is using HA mobile app on 4 mobiles (my kids are teenagers so have phones now), which works well.
- At night (winter) I have heating off but on really cold nights I have a threshold temperature, where the heating comes on at (15°C from memory) but this only gets triggered when external temps go below -5°C I’ve found.
- I’ve got a cooling mode that triggers on temperature and solar energy production (regardless if people are at home). I have energy costs for consumption & feed-in that incentivise self-use of solar, so this helps keep house cool (25° internal temp).
I hope this helps - I’m not really a power user so others may have better suggestions but this seems to work well for me.
I use appdaemon for my automations, but you could pull this off in many ways.
Firstly, I geotrack the family for home and away settings, with a couple tricks for guests.
Next, using an input_select I have created several ‘Modes’ for my home (Morning, Day, Night, Hold, Away etc). In an automation I trigger the modes based on a time of day configuration or another variable such as the geotracking. I use those modes as a conditional and/or trigger for automation, including the temperature setting of the thermostats. In addition, I have an outdoor temperature threshold which is a running 3hr average. Once it goes above a set high I switch to cool, or below a set low I switch to heat.