Winter is here in Australia and how annoying is it to automate an electric blanket? As some other posts have mentioned, modern electric blankets have an annoying (?) safety feature called auto-off - and it may or may not go into a sensible state on power-on. I am sharing this because it took me ages to figure out 
and did not involve sewing an ESP32 into a blanket.
In my case the electric blanket (Sunbeam from memory) when powered on, turns on at the last temperature setting, so far so good. But by default (without using a physical switch), it turns itself off after only an hour. To fix this the power needs to be cycled off and then back on again - every hour.
No problem I thought, I will just turn it off and back on again every hour with an AU$15 Arlec smart plug from Bunnings. Trouble was, the Arlec smart “grid connect” plug (or the Tuya integration) does not offer a sensor that allows you to tell the difference between you manually turning your blanket off with the physical button on the Arlec, and what you are doing in your automation. So how to keep your bed warm for the maybe 3 hour period when you may choose to go to bed, but still turn off, and stay off, when you turn the plug off manually (because you are in bed and warm enough)?
I figured a global toggle (input.boolean) would do the job. Turn it off every hour when doing automated on/off and back on again when “waiting” in case the physical plug is turned off.
It seems (and I am no expert) that even using the “run in sequence” option in the automation that HA does not guarantee that automation events happen in sequence. So to get this reliably working I had to have the automation wait (wait_template) to confirm that the last action had happened before continuing.
This automation also checks that the blanket is drawing power and not turned off by hand in a way the automation cannot fix and lets you know.
This is the automation YAML which requires one automation per blanket/person (it could be parameterised further). You would need to replace device names and check the device parameters (e.g. …_socket_1 etc to match your devices and as you see I am checking the temperature with a shelly and that we are “in town” vs in home zone.
This YAML requires you to define a global helper input.boolean called Plug6toggle or similar.
If this helps somebody, please let me know!
automation YAML
Blockquote
alias: Leckly blanket
description: Seperate per bed/pers
trigger:
- platform: time
at: "20:40:00"
condition:
- condition: numeric_state
entity_id: sensor.shellyplusht_083a8d3_temperature
below: 18
- condition: numeric_state
entity_id: sensor.home_me_distance
below: 10000
action:
- variables:
delay_minutes: 50
person: Me
- service: script.turn_on
target:
entity_id: script.electric_blanket_cycle
data:
variables:
entity_name: plug6
- service: notify.mobile_app_iphone
metadata: {}
data:
title: Home Assistant
message: "{{ person }} electric blanket turned on (1)"
- delay:
hours: 0
minutes: 4
seconds: 0
milliseconds: 0
- if:
- condition: numeric_state
entity_id: sensor.plug6_current
below: 0.02
then:
- delay:
hours: 0
minutes: 2
seconds: 0
milliseconds: 0
- if:
- condition: numeric_state
entity_id: sensor.plug6_current
below: 0.02
then:
- service: notify.mobile_app_iphone
metadata: {}
data:
title: "Home Assistant "
message: "Warning: {{ person }} blanket not on"
- delay:
hours: 0
minutes: "{{ delay_minutes | int }}"
seconds: 0
milliseconds: 0
- service: script.turn_on
target:
entity_id: script.electric_blanket_cycle
data:
variables:
entity_name: plug6
- service: notify.mobile_app_iphone
data:
message: "{{ person }} electric blanket turned on (2)"
title: Home Assistant
- delay:
hours: 0
minutes: "{{ delay_minutes | int }}"
seconds: 0
milliseconds: 0
- service: script.turn_on
target:
entity_id: script.electric_blanket_cycle
data:
variables:
entity_name: plug6
- service: notify.mobile_app_iphone
metadata: {}
data:
title: Home Assistant
message: "{{ person }} electric blanket turned on (3)"
- delay:
hours: 0
minutes: "{{ delay_minutes | int }}"
seconds: 0
milliseconds: 0
- service: script.turn_on
target:
entity_id: script.electric_blanket_cycle
data:
variables:
entity_name: plug6
- service: notify.mobile_app_iphone
metadata: {}
data:
title: Home Assistant
message: "{{ person }} electric blanket turned on (last)"
mode: single
This script simplifies the above automation and makes it easier to have per-person automations:
alias: Electric blanket cycle
description: relies on some naming conventions
fields:
entity_name:
selector:
text: null
name: entity_name
description: name of the blanket plug
default: plug6
sequence:
- variables:
toggle_name: input_boolean.{{ entity_name }}toggle
switch_name: switch.{{ entity_name }}
- service: input_boolean.turn_off
target:
entity_id: "{{ toggle_name }}"
data: {}
- wait_template: "{{ is_state(toggle_name, 'off') }}"
continue_on_timeout: true
timeout: "00:00:15"
- service: switch.turn_off
target:
entity_id: "{{ switch_name }}_socket_1"
data: {}
- delay:
hours: 0
minutes: 0
seconds: 2
milliseconds: 0
- service: switch.turn_on
target:
entity_id: "{{ switch_name }}_socket_1"
data: {}
- wait_template: "{{ is_state(switch_name, 'on') }}"
continue_on_timeout: true
timeout: "00:00:15"
- service: input_boolean.turn_on
target:
entity_id: "{{ toggle_name }}"
data: {}
mode: parallel
max: 2
