Velair: local-first climate scheduling for Home Assistant
Hi everyone,
I have been working on Velair, a custom Home Assistant integration for scheduling climate.* entities locally.
The goal is to provide a practical scheduler for heating and cooling that does not depend on vendor apps, cloud scheduling, subscriptions, or rate limits. Velair runs inside Home Assistant and keeps its configuration and learning data local.
What it does
Schedule Home Assistant climate.* entities from a sidebar panel
Create weekly blocks with HVAC mode and target temperature
Use templates to reuse schedules across rooms
Apply temporary boosts and pauses
Use optional Lovelace cards for dashboards
Export/import configuration
New beta: Adaptive Preconditioning
The current beta adds Adaptive Preconditioning.
Instead of applying a scheduled temperature exactly at the block start time, Velair can learn how long each climate/room usually takes to reach the target and start earlier when needed.
It learns locally inside Home Assistant, separately for heating and cooling, and can optionally use an outdoor temperature sensor as context. No calibration data is sent outside the Home Assistant instance.
This is still beta functionality, so I am especially interested in feedback from real installations.
Installation
Velair is not yet part of the default HACS repositories (I am waiting for the approval), but it can be installed as a custom repository:
Repository:
Category:
Integration
For the beta, install:
v1.1.0-beta.1
After installation, restart Home Assistant and add Velair from the integrations page.
Feedback I am looking for
Climate entities that behave differently than expected
Thank you for taking the time to read the post, I really appreciate it.
Velair has only just started, so any feedback, ideas, edge cases, or real-world setups are very welcome. The goal is not to build something short-lived or commercial, but to create a practical local-first climate scheduling tool that can be useful for the Home Assistant community over time.
If you try it or see anything that could be improved, please don’t hesitate to comment. Real feedback is exactly what will help shape it in the right direction.
Thanks for the feedback, these are very good points.
Yes, this is already being worked on. The idea is to allow each climate to use an optional external room temperature sensor, so Velair can make decisions based on the real room temperature instead of only relying on the temperature reported by the climate entity itself. This is especially useful for TRVs or devices where the built-in sensor is too close to the radiator or air outlet.
Yes, I agree. Fan speed and other climate-specific settings are important, especially for cooling. Right now Velair mainly focuses on HVAC mode and target temperature, but I do want to improve this because otherwise some AC/cooling setups are hard to control properly from a schedule.
Yes, this is also something I have in mind. Temperature alone is not always enough, especially when humidity changes the perceived comfort. I would like Velair to eventually support some kind of comfort or “feels like” logic, while keeping the configuration understandable and local-first.
All three points are aligned with where I would like Velair to go. The first one is already in progress, and I hope to publish these improvements in an upcoming beta once they are stable enough for real-world testing.
After some weeks of hard work, testing, feedback, and many small refinements, this release brings a big step forward for Velair. I am really happy to finally make these features available for real Home Assistant installations.
The main additions are:
Adaptive Preconditioning: Velair can learn locally how long a room usually takes to reach the scheduled temperature and start heating or cooling earlier when needed.
Room Assist: you can use a separate room temperature sensor while Velair still controls the real climate.* entity. This is especially useful for TRVs or climate devices whose internal temperature reading does not represent the actual room temperature well.
Optional climate controls: schedule blocks, templates, boosts, and services can now include supported options such as fan mode, preset mode, swing modes, and target humidity.
Improved Lovelace support: Preconditioning and Room Assist can also be shown as dedicated Lovelace views/cards.
Better mobile and dashboard UX: Next events, today’s timeline, settings, templates, preconditioning, and room assist views have all received visual and responsive improvements.
Everything stays local inside Home Assistant. Velair does not send schedules, climate history, room sensor data, outdoor sensor data, or learning data to external services.
Full release notes are available here:
Thanks a lot to everyone who tested the beta, asked questions, reported edge cases, or shared real-world use cases. That feedback helped shape this release quite a bit.
As always, feedback is very welcome. Velair is still a young project, and the goal is to keep improving it around real Home Assistant installations and practical climate setups.
Thanks again for these points. Two of them are now covered in v1.1.0.
Separate temperature sensor
Velair now includes Room Assist, which lets you select a separate room temperature sensor for a managed climate. Velair still controls the real climate.* entity, but can use the external sensor as the reference for the room temperature. This should help in cases where the climate device reports a temperature that does not represent the actual room well.
More cooler controls
Velair now supports optional climate controls when the climate entity exposes them, including fan mode, preset mode, swing mode, horizontal swing mode, and target humidity. These can be used in schedules, templates, boosts, and services.
Feels-like temperature / humidity-aware comfort
This is not implemented yet, but it is still an interesting direction. I want to approach it carefully because humidity-aware comfort can affect both heating and cooling decisions, and I do not want to add something that looks smart but behaves unpredictably in real homes.
The release notes are here if you want to take a look:
Your comment was very useful, so thank you for sharing it.
It has been almost a week since Velair 1.1.0 was released, and I wanted to share a small development update.
The first feedback from real installations has been very encouraging. In particular, one user reported that Room Assist solved the exact problem it was designed for.
For those who haven’t tried it yet, Room Assist can use a separate room temperature sensor and apply a limited temporary offset to the real climate.* target. It does not replace or bypass the thermostat’s own control logic, but it can help prevent a TRV from reducing its output too early because its internal sensor reads warmer than the actual room.
I have also received feedback that Adaptive Preconditioning becomes more accurate as it collects completed cycles. I am especially interested in how it behaves during spring and autumn, when outside conditions and room heating times can change significantly from one day to another.
What I am working on now
I am currently developing Environmental Comfort monitoring for a future Velair release.
The goal is to provide a local per-room view of:
temperature conditions;
humidity conditions;
CO2 air quality;
missing or outdated sensor readings;
Home Assistant events that can be used in automations.
This is still in development and is not part of Velair 1.1.0.
Everything remains local inside Home Assistant. Velair does not send schedules, climate readings, room sensor data, or learning observations to an external service.
I would be interested in hearing:
how Room Assist is behaving with your TRVs or thermostats;
whether Adaptive Preconditioning is adapting to changing outside conditions;
which temperature, humidity or CO2 conditions would be useful in your automations.