How to integrate wall cadet heaters into HA?

Hardware
1

I have a 5 bedroom house where I rent out the bedrooms to traveling nurses. The bathrooms and common areas are shared. I’m pretty much following the typical mid-term shared-living strategy. I don’t live in this house (which is 1 hour away from me), so I’ve automated a lot of things with HA, Yale zwave locks, zwave outlets/switches, ubiquiti cameras, etc.

The primary issue I still have to solve is managing the bathroom heaters. Each shared bathroom has a wall cadet heater with a manual turn knob. Someone staying in the house keeps turning the dial all the way to max in both bathrooms. The rooms are baking hot, the equipment is hot the the touch, and I’m having $700 electricity bills. This is an old historic house with single pane windows, so I normally have $400-500 bills in the winter, but I still need to find a way to manage the waste better.

Each guest room, the kitchen, and the living areas have Daikin mini-splits for heating and cooling. I’m working on automating them by adding wi-fi adapters and HA integration. For now I’ve programmed the device schedules to reset the temperature to 70 degrees at 12am, 6am, 12pm, 6pm.

But I don’t know how to solve the bathroom cadet problem. I’m willing to replace them with “smart cadets” if such a thing exists, but I haven’t found anything yet. The best idea I have so far is to install wall cadets that use an external thermostat and hook up a smart thermostat to each of them.

But before I go that route, I want to make sure I’m not missing other solutions. Does anyone here have other suggestions? Any recommended HA-compatible thermostats for controlling a single cadet (not an entire house)?

2

I have a couple of Cadet in-wall heaters. I purchased them without the onboard thermostat, though. You may be able to remove them. I connected them to an external smart thermostat from Mysa. I had Mysa working with HA but I am running in to issues now that I have rebuilt my HA instance on Raspberry Pi. I do like the Mysa thermostats, though. But, there may be something that better integrates with HA now.

3

Thank you, the Mysa thermostat definitely has potential!

My HA instance is running on Raspberry Pi as well. Might I run into problems with this setup like you are, or is there something specific to your setup that is causing you trouble?

4

I had previously been playing with HA on a Windows Virtual Machine. It discovered my Mysa automatically. I built a new Raspberry Pi 4 but it does not see the Mysa. I kinda wondered if it was the build version. I’m updating it tonight to 2023.1.6.