Sorry if this has been answered before.
I have a home brew thermostat that communicates via MQTT to HA. At some point in the recent past, a topic was added to separate “state” from “mode”, i.e. state=heating, mode=heat. Is there any way to get the HVAC card in lovelace to display what it is receiving in the state message so that you know what the current operation is vs the mode?
If not, what exactly is the state message used for in HA?
Scott…
Hi there Scott, You can create a mqtt sensor for this and then link it with the card. i dont have a brew thermostat to help you create the sensor but if you can share the mqtt messages received, I can try more.
Here are two cards representing the same climate entity. The top one is an Entities Card and the bottom one is a Thermostat Card.
The climate entity’s current state is heat and its current hvac_action is idle.
In the Entities card, it presents the data in this format:
hvac_action (state)
Therefore the data is shown as:
Idle (Heat)
In the Thermostat Card, hvac_action is shown in the center of the card and state is represented by an icon.
Unfortunately, the item “hvac_action” is only in “climate” of type hvac, it is not possible to use it in “climate” of type “mqtt_hvac”.
So “mqtt_hvac” only displays states from the “mode” item: “off/heating”. Does not have a status attribute that would express the fact that the heating element (valve or relay) is switched on.