Hello!
Thank you very much for the kind words. Velair began as a solution for my own climate-control needs, so seeing that it is useful to other Home Assistant users is genuinely rewarding.
Please keep sharing any feedback, questions, or ideas that come to mind. Even small points of confusion are valuable because they help improve both Velair and its documentation.
For your Home/Away use case, my usual recommendation is:
Use Profiles to define the climate behavior, and Modes to select the complete household setup.
Recommended setup
A simple structure would be:
- Use Default schedules for your normal Home routine.
- Create an Away Profile with the alternative behavior for each climate.
- Create an Away Mode that activates that Profile.
- Let Home Assistant select:
Default when somebody is home.Away when everybody has left.
In other words:
Default = normal Home schedules
Away Mode
└─ Away Profile
├─ Living room: reduced heating or higher cooling target
├─ Bedroom: different Away schedule
└─ Office: pause or turn off
Velair applies the currently active schedule block immediately when you change Mode; it does not wait for the next block.
Profiles and Modes
A Profile defines what climates should do.
For each climate, it can:
- Use an alternative weekly schedule.
- Continue using its Default schedule.
- Pause scheduling and leave the thermostat unchanged.
- Pause scheduling and turn the thermostat off.
Profile schedule blocks can include an explicit HVAC mode, so heating and cooling can behave differently:
Home in winter: heat to 21 °C
Away in winter: heat to 17 °C
Home in summer: cool to 24 °C
Away in summer: cool to 28 °C or turn off
Climates supporting heat_cool can instead use a lower and upper target range.
A Mode is a named household state, such as Away, Vacation, or Guests. It activates one or more non-overlapping Profiles together.
The distinction is:
- Profile: what each climate should do.
- Mode: which group of Profiles is active.
For a small installation, one Away Profile and one Away Mode may appear slightly redundant. However, the Mode makes the active state clearly visible as Away in Velair and Home Assistant.
Easiest automation: use the blueprint
Velair includes a Home/Away blueprint that watches one consolidated occupancy entity and runs your chosen Home and Away actions.
You can use it to select the Away Mode when the house becomes empty and return to Default when somebody comes home.
View the blueprint documentation
The blueprint supports occupancy delays and safely handles unknown or unavailable presence states.
Using your own automation
If you prefer, you can control Velair’s native Mode entity directly:
alias: Velair - Away
triggers:
- trigger: state
entity_id: binary_sensor.someone_home
to: "off"
for: "00:10:00"
actions:
- action: select.select_option
target:
entity_id: select.velair_mode
data:
option: Away
And return home with:
alias: Velair - Home
triggers:
- trigger: state
entity_id: binary_sensor.someone_home
to: "on"
actions:
- action: select.select_option
target:
entity_id: select.velair_mode
data:
option: Default
Replace the occupancy entity and Mode name with those used in your installation.
Can I use only a Profile?
Yes. If you only need one Away Profile, you can activate it directly:
action: velair.activate_profile
data:
profile_id: away
Return to the Default schedules with:
action: velair.deactivate_profile
Direct Profile activation sets Velair’s Mode to Manual. In this context, Manual does not mean that scheduling has stopped—it only means that the active Profile was selected directly instead of through a custom Mode.
For that reason, I normally prefer an explicit Away Mode: its meaning is clearer in the interface and in Home Assistant automations.
If presence and season are independent
If your climate entities handle heating/cooling automatically, Home and Away may be sufficient.
If Velair must explicitly choose the season as well, you can create complete setups such as:
- Home · Heating
- Away · Heating
- Home · Cooling
- Away · Cooling
Home Assistant can then select the correct Mode using both occupancy and season.
Profiles are not overlapping layers, so Velair does not merge an Away Profile with a separate Cooling Profile when both control the same climate. The selected Mode should represent the complete desired setup.
Events: the advanced option
Velair also emits velair_event events such as:
profile_changedclimate_target_appliedscheduler_mode_changed
These are useful when another automation needs to react after Velair changes something—for example, to send a notification or coordinate ventilation.
They are not normally required for Home/Away control. Selecting select.velair_mode, either directly or through the blueprint, is simpler and makes the current state clearly visible.
I would therefore start with Default schedules + one Away Profile + one Away Mode, and use the Home/Away blueprint to switch between them.
If you share whether heating and cooling use the same climate entities, separate devices, or heat_cool, I would be happy to suggest a more specific structure for your setup.
Thanks again for trying Velair, and please keep the feedback coming!
Several parts of this release exist because people described what worked, what did not, and what would make it more useful.
