ZEAL – Zoned heating control and visual climate scheduling for Home Assistant
Hi everyone,
I’ve been developing ZEAL, a Home Assistant custom integration aimed at making multi-room and multi-zone heating control much easier to configure, understand and operate.
The project started because my own heating system had grown increasingly complicated. I had multiple rooms, thermostats/TRVs, heating zones and floor controls, with automations trying to coordinate everything. It worked, but maintaining it was becoming unnecessarily difficult.
ZEAL is my attempt to move that logic into a proper Home Assistant integration with a straightforward UI.
What ZEAL does
ZEAL lets you organise your heating around zones and rooms, using standard Home Assistant climate entities.
It provides:
- Zone and room based heating control
- Visual climate scheduling
- Room temperature/setpoint management
- Quick changes and temporary overrides
- Away mode
- Coordination of heating demand across rooms/zones
- Protection against competing setpoint control
- Home Assistant-native configuration rather than a collection of YAML automations
The intention is that ZEAL handles the coordination while Home Assistant remains the source of the climate entities and devices.
Why I’ve made it
I’m not trying to replace Home Assistant’s climate platform.
The problem I’m trying to solve is what happens above individual thermostats once you have a larger heating installation.
For example:
House → Ground Floor → Living Room → thermostat/TRV
rather than treating every climate entity as an independent device and building a collection of automations around them.
I’ve tried particularly hard to make the UI simple enough that, once configured, you shouldn’t need to understand the underlying control logic just to change your heating schedule.
Current status
ZEAL is still a relatively new project and I’m now at the point where I’d like some other Home Assistant users to try it.
I’m therefore treating this as an early public release / beta rather than claiming everything is finished.
I’m particularly interested in people with different heating arrangements, because my biggest concern is inadvertently designing something that works beautifully with my system but makes assumptions that don’t hold true elsewhere.
Installation
ZEAL is not currently in the official HACS catalogue.
It can nevertheless be installed through HACS as a Custom Repository, so installation and subsequent updates can still be handled through HACS.
GitHub:
The repository contains the installation and setup instructions.
Feedback wanted
I’d really appreciate feedback from anyone willing to try it — particularly:
- different types of thermostats/TRVs
- unusual zone arrangements
- heat-pump installations
- conventional boiler installations
- larger multi-zone houses
- UI/setup issues
- anything where ZEAL makes an assumption about your heating system that it shouldn’t
Bug reports and feature requests can be raised through GitHub.
This has grown out of solving a real problem in my own Home Assistant installation, so I’d now like to find out whether it’s useful to the wider HA community.
Thanks — and constructive criticism is very welcome.