Ah, I also use hass to automate my home heating but for a much dumber reason...
I live in a really old house where the furnace is on a two-wire control system (open=off, closed=on) so no possibility of working in good smart thermostat solution.
So I just patched in a "smart" relay on the furnace wires that let me close them in a software controlled way and use temp sensors to control it over hass. I also kept the old dumb* thermostat connected in parallel and just set it really low as a failsafe to prevent stuff like pipes freezing in case my bodge smart automation job crashes silently when I'm away or something.
*: Only marginally newer than the mercury-in-a-tilting-tube ones, the one I have uses bi-metallic coil with a magnet on the end to control a reed switch.
Having a mechanical fallback is a really good idea. I always get a little worried when I see people patching together mission critical systems on a raspberry pi with little thought to failure modes. Learned this is the hard way.
Dealing ~99% reliable smart bulbs and guests not understanding the fancy buttons is death by a thousand cuts. Even a 0.1% failure to respond will add up fast if you have multiple bulbs per fixture.
Eventually, I switched to using Lutron Caseta products as the base layer. Now my light switches will still act like light switches if the hub is down and all the remotes are dead. And the remotes don't need the hub online.
Yeah there is very little thought in resilience in most such systems.
Ideally I'd see some generic rule-based system (maybe just WASM VM fed with some code and triggers?) that does just that - feeds code some data and pushes output to controllers, maybe with standarized methods to ask for historical/other sensor data, then have that just be a blob you can deploy on few devices, share a password and it would pick a master and keep rest in standby.
Then just have HA-like Web UI for configuration so the big fat of UI can run really wherever on anything, but the core that is needed for everything to actually work can sit on some cheap device in the closet.
Similar here in California, except the original thermostat is in series and set to an upper limit. Pipes freezing aren't a concern, but a $3,000 heating bill caused by a corrupt Raspberry Pi SD card is.
That's also the reason why boards that depend on SD card rather than for example eMMC are despised in the industrial world. SD cards are highly unreliable, whatever their brand or price: it's just a matter of when they will fail; I've lost count of how many of them I had to pull out and check/recover on my formerly Raspberry PI based media center before I ditched it for a Chromebox with reflashed firmware. Now that's not a big hassle in a home media center, but I wouldn't want for example to travel 300 Km to a mountain and climb a 20 meter pole to service a sensor up there that stopped working because its SBC SD card failed.
> I also kept the old dumb* thermostat connected in parallel and just set it low as a failsafe in case my utility wants to think I should freeze for my life choices
I’m not sure if you are using the qualifier “good” to exclude the nest, but it can work on a two wire system (it can siphon enough power to work without making the relay close)
It was upgraded with a rather new controller board at some point despite the machine being rather old, and is very unhappy about any extra loads on the heating control wire. In fact the controller supports all the things (even potentially controlling AC) but there are only 2 thermostat wires in the wall...
The old thermostat is placed quite far from any place I could plug in a transformer to... (otherwise, yes, that would have been the solution)
My current setup has the relay right next to the furnace, where there's plenty of mains lines to tap into for continuous power and this is fine since it doesn't measure anything and just gets commands from hass.
any recommendations for a cheap, simple, but "smart" relay+thermometer like this that can be added to a apple home/zigbee network in plug-and-play fashion[0]? i also have a dumb heater that would be nice to be automated. the existing dumb thermometer/switch is too close to the heat, making that thermostat unreliable, and i can't move it without tearing up walls.
[0]: without having to run home assistant if possible
There "Blakadder's Smarthome Shenanigans" website is a good reference to identify if a Zigbee device might work with your system. If a device is compatible with many, it is almost certain it is also compatible with your solution.
i went down the rabbit hole a bit and there doesn't seem to be a homekit-enabled millivolt (not low voltage, which is 24V apparently) thermostat available. however, i did find this little project: https://zekesnider.com/using-an-ecobee-thermostat-with-a-mil... it seems you could patch any low-voltage thermostat to support millivolt in the same way (with a 24V transformer and a relay switch), but the ecobee3 lite has homekit support built-in.
For anyone interested, there’s a neat HACS integration: Better Thermostat [0] that simplifies some common usages: Auto off on window open heat to room temperature (as opposed to TRV measured temperature) are the big ones for me.
For a bit of clarification if readers are not familiar with Home Assistant
Home Assistant is an
> Open source home automation that puts local control and privacy first. Powered by a worldwide community of tinkerers and DIY enthusiasts. Perfect to run on a Raspberry Pi or a local server.
> Home Assistant Community Store (HACS) is a Plugin in Home Assistant that gives you the ability to download and update plugins that are on GitHub and are not in the Home Assistant standard repository.
I use a Hive thermostat. It's much cheaper than Nest and it doesn't talk to the cloud at all, if you buy the hub-less version.
It communicates over Zigbee and works great with Home Assistant over Zigbee2MQTT.
My version supports both heating and hot water (important for system boilers in UK) but there's also a "just heating" version for combi-boilers.
The installation is really trivial, at least in UK where the programmer plate is pretty much standard in every house.
Even if you don't connect it to HA, the programmer/thermostat provided by Hive is so much better than the usual Drayton crap you see in UK.
Any issues using the Hive without the hub? They sure make it sound required... Any features that don't work, etc? And HA can fully control the Hive thermostat via Zigbee?
I just manually alternate bedroom/living room throughout the day. Yes, it's a lot of walking (1up1down) but still better than spending ~£50 on each radiator.
Interesting. Unless I’m missing something, my Honeywell T9 thermostat already handles most of this. I’ve got 4 remote sensors hooked up to it. It’s fully programmable without any app. (I think it needs WiFi for initial setup, but it’s been fire-walled off since.)
It also connects with home assistant over Wi-Fi. Combined with my home-kit window AC unit, I have full control over scripting, with the thermostat able to operate independently if Home Assistant fails.
When I got my new HVAC system installed a few months ago (heat pump, woohoo!), they needed to upgrade my thermostat, so they gave me a Honeywell VisionPro 8000, which is a "smart" thermostat but, like your T9 (I think), demands WiFi and some garbage "cloud" service to access the connected features.
I replaced it with a T6 Pro, a thermostat which is by all other metrics a downgrade, but which has a single killer feature: Z-Wave. No phoning home, no janky embedded devices on my WiFi network, just a solid integration with Home Assistant that falls back to a regular thermostat if my HA server is down.
Seems like Honeywell is moving away from making Z-Wave versions of their products, because I think most consumers are generally content to tunnel their request through some shitty cloud thing every time they want to turn the heat up... but for those of us who are a little more ideologically rigid about keeping their stuff LAN-only, would definitely recommend grabbing a T6 Pro while they're out there.
As far as I can tell, the only T9 features needing an internet connection are local weather, geo-fencing, and remote control.
WiFi isn’t necessary and can be turned off. Quite a few settings can only be set on the thermostat itself. It has an on-screen keyboard and by its appearance, I think it runs some version of android. :)
That's my approach to heating as well - I'd rather not have Hass directly control the boiler/radiators with relays since in case of failure you could have the system either stuck on or off. A network-connected thermostat where Hass merely sends commands to is better since it will still retain some functionality should Hass fail.
I have T9s as well but the Z-Wave variant. Mine are more like traditional digital thermostats with thresholds and momentum compensation but it's all manual and not self calibrated. You can however program them via Z-Wave so you could use Home Assistant to do the Smart part.
Modern thermostats are a bit better than simply turning the boiler on when cold, off when hot. They are Time Proportional & Integral (TPI) devices. Put simply, they 'learn' the characteristics of the room - how long it takes to heat up and how much heat it needs to maintain the temperature. This is then used to work out how much to cycle the boiler on/off to keep the actual temperature much closer to the set point. Less variation makes for a much more comfortable room with less temperature swing than a simple thermostat can do. I see no reason this couldn't be built into HASS, but to my knowledge it isn't in there.
Also, modern boilers have digital control such as OpenTherm. They aren't just simple on/off devices, but instead vary their output based on the heat demand. The heating controller works out the temperature losses across the system, and gets the boiler to moderate the flow to match. This means that instead of turning on and off all the time, the boiler runs continuously at a low rate. More efficient with less wear and much tighter temperature control.
Even mechanical thermostats have heat anticipator settings. When the thermostat turns the furnace on, it also turns on a small heater in the thermostat. This simulates the heat that will continue to arrive (thermal momentum, as it were) after the furnace is turned off. Otherwise, the temperature will forever be overshooting the thermostat setting.
> In my house, our nursery both cooled faster and heated faster than any other room in the house. The thermostat (a Nest) controlled the boiler from the living area, and would often turn off the boiler while the nursery was still chilly.
This Home Assistant project is great fun, and I highly recommend playing with HASS to anyone who likes to play around with and maintain these things.
But for anyone looking for an easier solution: Ditch the Nest and get an ecobee with remote sensors. Nest has remote sensors as well, but you can only pick one. ecobee will average across the sensors you choose. It also has a mode that can follow occupancy detection and prioritize rooms with movement, but that's not useful for a nursery with a sleeping baby like this.
In reality I noticed that while it helps in maintaining the set temperature in a given room, it ends up over heating or cooling some of the other rooms.
Unless you have controllable vents like this https://flair.co/pages/flair-google-nest-thermostat it probably won’t help much (as one of the comment says, this product isn’t well reviewed. I was just giving an example).
I don't really trust Google to not break Nest integrations.
I wasn't following it then, but Google phased out earlier "works with nest".
Last year, the oauth for HA's nest addon broke. Supposedly they did work with Google folks to ensure a smooth transition. It works now.
But ultimately we use Nest with HA at Google's discretion. Part of the strength of HA is its ability to use cloud-free, local-only infrastructure, meaning it won't break on the whim of a megacorp.
FWIW, a lot of other startups have gone belly up, and taken their infrastructure offline, and that is worse IMO. E.g. I purchased my light switches from Lutron just because I knew they were going to be around (I have seen a few startups go offline). Before you say, "Oh, if they made it all local then stuff will still work". Yes, that's true to some extent, but then it is still possible that there could be security issues that need to be patched down the line. And one can say "Then you should quarantine the hub and have it connect to HA instance only"... but most people are not going to be able to do that, or may be too much work to maintain over time.
Hopefully with Matter, we'll see more products that can work securely + locally. But IMHO, the tech just wasn't there before (at a price point that was cheap).
Sadly, ZigBee is a failure in practice. If you buy a Zigbee hub from one vendor, it is unlikely it will reliably work with Zigbee products from another vendor.
Zwave doesn't have this issue, but it lacks market adoption. Likely due to cost, but I am not sure.
I've found zwave to be more flakey than lutron caseta. The "700 series" controller needed to have a lot of firmware patches in the time I've owned one. Even after that, I see a lot of dropped packets.
i'd recommend against ecobee due to API stability and bad UI/UX. Long story short, i've been a home assistant user for many years. When google shutdown the nest API long ago, i purchased an ecobee and set it up.
I will provide more details if asked, but the mobile app was awful due to the ecobee server API constantly failing to work properly and the UI not being in sync with reality. There has been times at 3am when I tried to turn a fan off, I simply could not due to API errors.
I'm back to nest and have written ecobee off as a suck cost.
The suggestion I've seen recently is to use Home Assistant as a HomeKit controller which allows local control of the Ecobee, rather than online servers.
That's exactly what I thought of when I read the issue because I did that myself and it works great. My Ecobees have multiple sensors and I have zero complaint about them. Fantastic integration with HA too. I love tracking the indoors humidity graph and have alerts on when I should use more moisturizer.
I have considered switching a bunch of times. Its just been hard to justify spending money on new thermostats and sensors, since I already have the Nest. If I could go back and change what I originally bought I definitely would though.
> Install Smart TRVs. This doesn’t actually address the initial problem at all. Smart TRV can’t heat a room if the boiler has been switched off by a central thermostat.
A valid point but the way round this is to set the main thermostat to the highest temp you would ever want the house to be and have the schedule to 24 hours or just the primary heating hours of the day.
I say this so those in rented accommodation don’t think they miss out on this fun. You can swap TRVs out with no plumbing skills and you don’t need to worry about what primary thermostat you have.
There are Smart TRVs that can wirelessly trigger a contact closure that will turn on a zone for the boiler. You could also listen to the (usually Zigbee) protocol messages and close a relay yourself if you have a home automation setup (either directly from Zigbee, or by gatewaying the Zigbee to MQTT and then responding to the MQTT traffic).
The problem with running a call for heat to the boiler (nearly) full-time is that that will run the circulator pump for the zone and, if there's nowhere for that water to go (because all TRVs are closed and there's no "loopback" pipe), the circulator is going to draw a lot of power and eventually fail from being deadheaded.
> The problem with running a call for heat to the boiler (nearly) full-time is that that will run the circulator pump for the zone and, if there's nowhere for that water to go (because all TRVs are closed and there's no "loopback" pipe), the circulator is going to draw a lot of power and eventually fail from being deadheaded.
It's common to leave a single radiator without TRV for that reason - typically the bathroom.
I've found the TRV-less radiator is usually in the hallway as that's historically where a thermostat would live (ground floor, no windows, cool) and you don't want them to battle each other. You also want it to be sufficiently far from the boiler so the return water cools enough and you stay in/near the sweet spot for a modern condensing boiler.
TRVs are often avoided in bathrooms since those rooms have another source of heating (bath/shower) that will screw up what it's trying to do. Also, some smart TRVs don't have sufficient IP rating for such a moist environment. That said, you could install one in a bathroom and people do. Not sure why though, maybe they get carried away with their smart setup.
It depends on the circulator. If it’s the usual Taco 007, then yep it’ll fail. If it’s an ECM circulator set on delta-P like a Grundfos Alpha, then it won’t mind a bit.
I didn't understand the quoted critism from the article. Smart TRVs are supposed to be able to independently call for heat, isn't that the whole point of them.
There's nothing very smart about simply reporting they are too cold - is that really all Nest can do!?! I was under the impression that Tado, Drayton Wiser, etc handled this properly and would have solved the problem (albeit for lots more money).
I don't know what type of gas meter you have in uk so this might not work for you but I used a aqara door/window sensor without the plastic case stuck under the meter digits. There's a magnet embedded in the last digit so it will trigger it once per revolution. It looks like this: https://community.home-assistant.io/t/gas-meter-from-xiaomi-... .I saw that others 3d printed an enclosure and moved the reed sensor closer, but, i just wrapped it in electrical tape and it's been sitting there for 6 months without an issue.
Allow me to point out that Ireland isn’t in the UK. Irish people get pissed off when someone assumes their country is still part of the UK, for obvious reasons.
My forced-hot-water furnace, probably like most recent furnaces, can run at a range of power levels, producing radiator water at a variety of temperatures. Unfortunately, its only input is a binary one: "gimme heat" or "don't gimme heat". That means there's no way for it to adjusts its output intelligently based on the room temperature deficit. (There is an outdoor temperature sensor that gives it some intelligence, but not a whole lot.)
I'd love to have a system where the furnace controller knew the actual and set temperatures for the various zones, and could throttle itself up and down to best meet the heating needs. Haven't seen one, though.
I think newer heat pumps (forced air or mini splits) do this. My parents got one and it seems to just run almost all the time, producing a varied amount of heat or cooling.
This does indeed require some fancy touchscreen super thermostat thing though, so that's probably the crux of this.
> This does indeed require some fancy touchscreen super thermostat thing though, so that's probably the crux of this.
And that's where things start to, in a technical term, suck.
I added a forced air heat pump to my house two years ago. I already had a boiler and radiator heat, this added some duct work to the house that covers most of the rooms. The boiler has got to stay in for right now because it powers the water heater (indirect water heater). I'll probably replace that with a heat pump water heater next year once more of the rebates come online.
We got a reasonably high performance heat pump from Lennox. The price was fair - especially given the amount of work that needed to be done to add in duct work to my house. And, to be honest, it works great. At least on the mechanical front.
However, because it is a modulating heat pump it requires a communicating thermostat. I'm pretty sure this giant tablet thing mounted to my wall will die before the rest of the system. The software is buggy and laggy - sometimes not taking my finger presses and not saving changes to my schedule. It's ability to detect occupancy is hot garbage because it requires me to have the iComfort app installed and always give it access to my location.
And that's where stuff gets really awesome! The iOS app and the web site are such hot trash that every time I use it I feel like I need to write another negative review. There's actually two different versions of the devices that use two different apps - both called iComfort. I'm on the newer "fancier" one that can support multiple homes. But, about half the time the app never loads properly and when it does load it doesn't take setting changes most of the time. Meaning that you need to kill the app and try again.
Looking through the source code for the web page reveals why it might have these problems. The JavaScript has numerous syntax errors that browsers might just ignore, inconsistently named functions, no discernible style, and typos that make it obvious that it was outsourced to the lowest bidder.
Now, I thought I'd be okay because it has IFTTT integration. Nope. You can turn the thermostat off, but not on. You can change the temperature, but not activate a program. A worthless integration.
I'd love to find a way to just replace it with another Ecobee or a even better, something with a true local API.
tl;dr: Lennox S30, E30, M30 thermostats are not worth your money.
>It is inevitable that some rooms in a house will cool faster than others
Feels like a system like this could use a way to pipe air from one room into another to achieve target temperatures. Should be way more energy efficient as 1st line of defense
> My Google Nest Thermostat was part of the problem, and I needed to get rid of it to improve my home heating. The problem is that any central thermostat will shut down the boiler as soon as it reaches its target temperature, even if there are other areas in the house that still need to be heated.
I think this is important. The so-called smart thermostats have a very narrow optimization scope.
So, I made a raspberry pi into a smart thermostat with remote sensors all over my house which allowed me to do all kinds of targetted heating, averages, etc. Turns out that Ecobee makes one, and it's quite good. Been happily using them ever since.
I feel like my partner and I have been in a virtual thrupple relationship with Nest's useless "machine learning algorithm" for the past five years, passive-aggressively fighting for control of the heat.
You can get motorized dampers that you install where the branches come off the main trunk.
My understanding is it's not great to shut down vents all the way since it increases the static pressure in the branch and the air is just going to try to find ways out. You also have to be careful with closing down too many registers as it can cause too much pressure on the furnace. Some furnaces will shut down in this case.
Right, with the smart dampers I dream of they would just be placed as register covers throughout the house, and would communicate with each other and the furnace to regulate house temp. So they would never try to close many at once, it's more like the cold room opens wide and the rest close a little bit.
In my fantasies the central controller can learn how much to open each vent until each room heats up at about the same rate. Presumably that would end up with one or more vents fully open, and the more insulated rooms progressively more closed.
>> In my house, our nursery both cooled faster and heated faster than any other room in the house. The thermostat (a Nest) controlled the boiler from the living area, and would often turn off the boiler while the nursery was still chilly.
Nerd solution: integrated sensors. Smart home devices. Complex multi-zone heating. Issue never really goes away. Each time something is updated/bricked the entire system must be revisited. (See LLT tech tips videos about Linus's new house.) I'm still laughing at his hot LCD displays mounted directly below the thermostats in each room.
Actual solution: An electric space heater. Available at any Walmart for 25$. Built in thermostat. Problem solved.
Put an ESP32[0] in the space heater. Detect temperature, humidity, barometric pressure. Detect human presents, identify if it is human versus dog. Provide Zigbee communication to Home Assistant. Send alert if dangerously excessive electricity is used, and shut down power to device. Check external weather to make sure water pipes do not freeze when away, and keep heat sufficiently high to prevent freezing but optimize for lowest power usage. Check every 15 seconds. Write automation that knows when away, on vacation, or price of electricity is too high turning it off, on, or throttling to reduce consumption. Reduce grid usage, by heating during best solar panel power generation.
And, then you just began. This is how Home Assistant used. :)
I just stuck a door sensor on the nursery and have the space heater turn on if the door is closed for two minutes (and back off when it’s open for two minutes).
Perfect mix for us. Not (much) to break in the automation.
Careful with how you're enabling the space heater, many smart plugs aren't designed for space heaters (or other high amperage devices). Though there are plenty that are.
I run Home Assistant on a RasPi 4B and it takes care of the office temperature & humidity more precise and cost efficient than if I fiddled with the knobs on heater and dehumidifier.
I tried, I couldnt take it. Between doing things the most botched way possible and spending the most money possible (My 4 billion $$$$ home theater system clickbait) I couldnt take it anymore. Its a low form of scam / con when you use your home renovation as a tax writeoff and "content".
The con aspect of tax write-off is offset by him being stuck with a lot of early adopter systems that don’t really work. I suspect his family would have been happier using 5$ thermostats that actually worked than such poorly implemented home automation.
LTT is like 95% entertainment 5% actually somewhat informative.
OMG, a few thousand dollars is being deducted for a canadian business making money from mostly foreign countries, helping the trade balance, spending money in the canadian economy, hiring people who also pay taxes, promoting canada as a country and more, but they're ripping off canada because he dares have a few well documented tax deductions.
LTT needs to make a video either way. If he sets up home automation at his house or an artificial studio demo the same money is spent and not ending up going toward Canadian schools.
In terms of the deduction, I doubt he’s committing actual tax fraud if for no other reason than he’s so public a figure.
Ya but it is also a common syndrome in Vancouver. Someone building a "nice" house is pulled in by people touting various control systems. The systems never really work. It is always the first time the installers to be installing this particular equipment. There are reasons why people with old money still use standard light switches just like poor people.
I remember some IoT switches that just had lamp and switch connector and outside of control did just that - worked as dumb switch so if all else failed lights still worked as usual.
It is still adding one extra component that could fail, but it was at least immune to "controller died, nothing works" problem.
Part of the reason why I went with Lutron Caseta, only to learn their hubs do not include telnet access on the basic model to allow private management of the switches. Still some workarounds for it, but the need to register a cloud account initially remains unimpressed.
The cloud is always someone else's computer, the cloud always costs someone $, and over time, there will be less incentive to provide it.
It's such garbage content and I also stopped watching. I figure he probably can expense a lot of the cost/tax because it's a business purchase once he makes content out of it but not sure if that works the way I think it does..
People write off personal stuff as a business expense all the time, it's not like tax authorities have the time to go through line items on invoices.
As for the legality, when you take stuff that you bought for the company and later use it for personal things, you need to "pay" the company for it, you can't just write if off.
Plus that whole project has been a disaster anyway. This is like his third attempt at centralized gaming machines, and even this one is buggy and problematic.
His previous one was flagged by anti-cheat due to it being VM-based.
> Each time something is updated/bricked the entire system must be revisited.
The advantage of a fully local, self-contained system is that you can treat it as an appliance - you don't have to update or tinker with it continuously. There's no reason for it to update or brick itself.
A friend of mine still has a Home Assistant set up from now almost 3 years ago running with no updates or anything - it just acts like a PLC to manage some lights, switches and toggles heating on/off based on window sensors. Nobody has to mess with it and it just works in the background.
>> toggles heating on/off based on window sensors.
Do people want this? Maybe I want both warmth and fresh air in the room? And I foresee the day where the window sensor is faulty. I'm shivering in bed as I have an argument with my furnace about which one of us should be in charge of setting the temperature in my bedroom.
It's a fail-safe against leaving in the morning for work, opening the windows, and leaving the heating on full-blast all day long as it tries to heat the outside. It matters even more now given the energy prices in some countries.
Hass just sends on/off commands to a self-contained thermostat in response to window sensor state change events. If it fails, you can still manually go to the thermostat and set it to whatever you want.
Flip side - one sensor failure and your home is without heating, and if you so happen to be on winter vacation at the time it can possibly be catastrophical
For a more advanced use case I’ve recently set it up so that the thermostat logic is within HASS. An automation driven by a binary switch helper then switches the thermostat to a fixed hot or cold value for heat and AC. Then I can feed the HASS thermostat with whatever temperature sensor data I want, like an average of multiple sensors around the house. All this is totally optional though if you just want to control the thermostat from within HASS.
Especially in Europe, many people have radiators right under the windows. If the windows are open and the radiators aren't turned off, the cold air will come in, fall down and hit the thermostat, which will lead to the radiator running at full power because it stays cold.
Yes, in this case nobody looks at the UI - Hass acts as a glorified PLC (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programmable_logic_controller). I look at it every few months out of curiosity when I have the opportunity to visit but given that it works well and fits their needs I resist the urge of updating the system.
If there was a need for a UI I'd probably enable the HomeKit Bridge extension and let them control it via HomeKit (with only specific entities whitelisted) so that 1) they don't have to suffer through the eyesore that is Material Design and 2) don't get confused by a lot of the internal, read-only entities.
If you're looking at the Home Assistant admin interface all the time, you're doing it wrong IMHO. The key reason to do home automation is if it's actually automated and not just replacing a bunch of physical switches with web page switches. For the things which cannot be automated, bridge them over to HomeKit (or Google's thing) so they can be natively controlled by your phone and/or voice assistant.
A lot of things could be automated in my home if HASS knew that I'm not working tomorrow, that one of us or both of us are in bed, etc., but no idea how to best tell HASS about these things and how to model all the different cases without going crazy.
You can integrate it with a calendar and have automations based on the events. So you can have a work calendar that it checks before doing specific automations.
People have also built a variety of presence sensors for beds. With pressure sensors and such. Or if you have a Sleep Number bed, it also has presence detection. You could also do things like detecting phone is in the room and plugged in as a rough equivalent for presence of the person.
The real win was balancing the boiler and TRVs. Automating the boiler for efficiency is neat. I'd have kept a spare thermostat connected (with a physical switch for it's power) in case all that automation implodes, though.
> Electric resistive heating is much more expensive than gas heating.
That seems like a complex question to answer.
Electric heating is more efficient than gas heating (100% Vs. 95%), but electricity costs more than natural gas, taking out any benefit. But that isn't even what makes this complicated, if they're running their natural gas whole-home system to heat a single room, how does THAT compare to a more costly room heater?
Heat pumps are definitely more efficient (e.g. 300%) but cost $1K for a single mini-split, and installation costs/permitting is expensive. $5K isn't unrealistic for just one installed, maybe $2K~ DIY (assuming you can even pull the permit yourself for both electric and HVAC).
I hear that Mr. Cool is a good DIY heat-pump option. The refrigerant is "precharged" / included (i.e. you don't have to mess with refrigerant). https://mrcool.com/diy-4th-generation/
> I'm still laughing at his hot LCD displays mounted directly below the thermostats in each room
I caved and watched - as this triggered my interest. It was actually worse than I expected. They really have 'designed' the system to be broken, and they were just pretending they couldnt figure out how to make it work, and had been sat in a freezing house for weeks ... right?
I live in a really old house where the furnace is on a two-wire control system (open=off, closed=on) so no possibility of working in good smart thermostat solution.
So I just patched in a "smart" relay on the furnace wires that let me close them in a software controlled way and use temp sensors to control it over hass. I also kept the old dumb* thermostat connected in parallel and just set it really low as a failsafe to prevent stuff like pipes freezing in case my bodge smart automation job crashes silently when I'm away or something.
*: Only marginally newer than the mercury-in-a-tilting-tube ones, the one I have uses bi-metallic coil with a magnet on the end to control a reed switch.