Hi @GuiPom!
I found your video incredibly thorough. You explored Velair in real depth and explained its features and setup clearly, leaving very little to guesswork. Thank you also for your kind words about the project—I really appreciate them.
I also understand and respect your editorial independence, and I appreciate the detailed, practical feedback you’ve shared here and along the video.
I haven’t had enough time to reply properly to both of your messages, but your suggestions haven’t been forgotten. I’ve been working on several of these areas, and the upcoming version now includes some substantial additions.
Away mode and return anticipation
Your main point is addressed by a new native feature called Planned Return, configured directly in the Velair panel. It also provides Home Assistant actions, including velair.start_planned_return, so automations and scripts can use the same native behavior.
It brings together household occupancy, Away settings, an expected arrival time, and Velair’s existing adaptive preconditioning. It uses Modes and Profiles to define the away and return settings, so each room can have its own targets.
You can configure a regular weekly arrival routine or plan a one-off return for later today, including when you’re already away. Velair calculates preparation for each room using its existing heating/cooling learning and the temperature required by the destination schedule at arrival.
For your example of keeping the house at 17°C while away and wanting 20°C at 7 PM, the aim is to calculate when preparation should begin so the house is closer to that target by 7 PM. That anticipation is handled inside Velair, without having to calculate the timing yourself in external automations.
You can also adjust the arrival time, skip the planned return, or indicate that you’re home early. The panel shows each room’s preparation status and explains when advance preparation is unavailable.
This first beta supports same-day returns. Overnight and multi-day planned arrivals aren’t included yet, so it doesn’t cover every absence scenario you described. That is a deliberate scope choice for the first iteration: I prefer to develop and validate features step by step. My intention is to expand the supported return scenarios as the feature matures.
Reusable temperatures and seasonal schedules
The new version also introduces shared climate presets and linked daily templates.
Several schedule blocks can reference the same preset, and editing that preset updates its linked uses. Daily templates can share just their times, allowing different temperatures in different Profiles, or share both times and climate settings. This should help with your “same schedule, different winter/summer temperatures” example.
For dynamic adjustments, the new velair.update_block_preset action lets a Home Assistant automation or script update a shared preset using values calculated by Home Assistant templates. Velair then updates the affected schedules and preconditioning plans.
This provides a route for template-driven temperatures, although it isn’t direct Jinja template support inside Velair’s temperature fields. Your existing approach of selecting Modes from Home Assistant can also work alongside these reusable schedules and presets.
A suggestion for Comfort
From your walkthrough, one option I’d recommend exploring is Guided psychrometric range in the Comfort configuration. It accounts for the physical relationship between temperature and relative humidity, adapting the acceptable humidity range across your configured temperature range. This gives a more useful interpretation than treating the same humidity percentage identically at every temperature.
If you also enable Outdoor comparison and select outdoor temperature and humidity sensors, Velair can suggest when opening a window could move the room closer to your comfort range, potentially reducing the need for heating or air conditioning. It can also highlight trade-offs when ventilation would improve one aspect but worsen another.
Those suggestions are available through the Ventilation opportunity sensor, so you could use it in an automation to send yourself a notification when ventilation might help.
Window handling
That ventilation guidance is separate from your suggestion about automatically pausing a thermostat when a window opens. I understand the distinction you’re making between a robust automation mechanism and a simple built-in setup.
Directly assigning a window sensor to a thermostat for automatic pausing isn’t part of this beta; the existing window-pause blueprint remains the available approach. I’ve kept your suggestion in mind.
Although Velair already has quite a few features, they reflect the care, time, and effort I put into my projects. It is still only a few months old, and this will be its first winter in real-world use. I expect broader testing to reveal bugs and details that need refining. That’s why I’ve also put considerable work into diagnostics and clear explanations of what Velair is doing: to make problems easier to understand and investigate, and help limit their impact wherever possible.
I’m aiming to release the beta over the next few days, hopefully this weekend, once the remaining checks are complete.
Would you be willing to try it and share your feedback—especially on Planned Return and whether it fits the away/anticipation workflow you described? Testing it against your actual setup would be very helpful.
Thanks again for taking the time to explore Velair so thoroughly and explain where it could work better for you! 
I am documenting my migration from Netatmo to Tado + Home Assistant + Velair to prepare 2026/2027 and I will most probably also have another content after Winter to explain what went well with this new local control approach.
Watch the video here (
