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Nice write-up OP. I've been using HA a little longer than yourself and took the exact same steps a few years ago. It's good to see we ended up at the same "con

Nice write-up OP. I've been using HA a little longer than yourself and took the exact same steps a few years ago. It's good to see we ended up at the same "conclusion". I decided to buy dedicated hardware for HA as opposed to the VM approach as I wanted it to be completely independent from my home servers running non-critical tasks. I bought a Minisforum mini-PC with far-far overkill performance, RAM and storage for HA, but that's just how I roll. With well over 100 devices, I switched to MariaDB and Influx too, I also solved the heating a couple of years ago, here's a quick summary: I have a BLE temperature sensor in every room of the house (Switchbot Meter Plus), and I have a Z-Wave TRV on each radiator, I grouped the values into upstairs and downstairs for day/night with some exceptions for home offices, and calculate a sort of "average" temperature. With some scripts to create a hysteresis, I turn the overall heating on/off when the "average" temperature is below set temperature - 0.2C or above set temperature + 0.3C, each room has an individual set temperature and I turn off the TRV if that room goes above the set temperature and back on if it drops below, again with some light hysteresis. I then have some automations to switch to day/night/away modes with different set temperatures and rooms on/off depending on the situation. As for lighting, I use "Circadian Lighting" which _does_ allow light groups, so I just specify the groups in yaml and it takes care of the group as a whole. I think it's probably lacking some functionality of the Adaptive Lighting plugin, but I haven't had to worry about differences in bulb types, I have a mix of Hue (80% of my bulbs) and IKEA (white only and colour).

moepstar 2y ago
> on/off when the "average" temperature is below set temperature - 0.2C or above set temperature + 0.3C, each room has an individual set temperature and I turn off the TRV if that room goes above the set temperature and back on if it drops below, again with some light hysteresis. Until you discover the generic thermostat helper :)
- alias_neo 2y ago
  I am using that already, I may have missed some features but it didn't seem to support the more complex requirements I had for my heating. I use the helper to manage the overall heating, by giving it my calculated "average" as the target sensor, and I use the home/away/sleep values. The complexity in my setup is managing individual rooms which I control independently of the overall heating state; it's a fairly large home for the UK and an old one, some rooms come up to temperature much quicker than others and I want them at different temperatures too, so each room is switched as a separate zone using its TRV and sensor.
- vinc 2y ago
  Indeed! I started with rules to turn on or off my individual heaters based on the temperature of the room but that's too many rules to setup and update. Then I found the generic thermostat helper and my appreciation for HA immediately went one lever higher!
mvip 2y ago
> As for lighting, I use "Circadian Lighting" which _does_ allow light groups, so I just specify the groups in yaml and it takes care of the group as a whole. I think it's probably lacking some functionality of the Adaptive Lighting plugin, but I haven't had to worry about differences in bulb types, I have a mix of Hue (80% of my bulbs) and IKEA (white only and colour). Author here. Interesting. I wasn't able to make the groups work either with Flux or with Adaptive Lighting. Not sure why, but I didn't spend too many cycles on it tbh. Also, good ideas on the heating. Will look at that.

moepstar 2y ago

> on/off when the "average" temperature is below set temperature - 0.2C or above set temperature + 0.3C, each room has an individual set temperature and I turn off the TRV if that room goes above the set temperature and back on if it drops below, again with some light hysteresis. Until you discover the generic thermostat helper :)

alias_neo 2y ago
I am using that already, I may have missed some features but it didn't seem to support the more complex requirements I had for my heating. I use the helper to manage the overall heating, by giving it my calculated "average" as the target sensor, and I use the home/away/sleep values. The complexity in my setup is managing individual rooms which I control independently of the overall heating state; it's a fairly large home for the UK and an old one, some rooms come up to temperature much quicker than others and I want them at different temperatures too, so each room is switched as a separate zone using its TRV and sensor.
vinc 2y ago
Indeed! I started with rules to turn on or off my individual heaters based on the temperature of the room but that's too many rules to setup and update. Then I found the generic thermostat helper and my appreciation for HA immediately went one lever higher!

mvip 2y ago

> As for lighting, I use "Circadian Lighting" which _does_ allow light groups, so I just specify the groups in yaml and it takes care of the group as a whole. I think it's probably lacking some functionality of the Adaptive Lighting plugin, but I haven't had to worry about differences in bulb types, I have a mix of Hue (80% of my bulbs) and IKEA (white only and colour). Author here. Interesting. I wasn't able to make the groups work either with Flux or with Adaptive Lighting. Not sure why, but I didn't spend too many cycles on it tbh. Also, good ideas on the heating. Will look at that.