I have a pretty simple smart thermostat without many fancy features. Every Spring and Fall I tell myself I should set up some kind of system where if the outdoor weather is good enough, maybe I dial back the heating / cooling, maybe send myself a text to open windows, etc.
Small example: I normally keep my house at 72 in the summer, but if it’s up to 76 or so outside, it’d be nice if the thermostat turned off the cooling. I could manually turn it back on if I have guests over, etc.
I’m sure some of this logic would be easy to code myself, but wanted to check out what anyone else is doing first.
Using home assistant.
I have some logic around notifications and a few actions. My spouse and I both grew up in houses with heat, but no AC, so I’ve programmed HA to send notifications to our phones if the setpoint on our Ecobee thermostat is warmer than the outside temperature in Cooling mode, and cooler than the outside temp in Heating mode. Outdoor temps are a blend of three weather service feed “feels like” observations and two outdoor temperate/humidity sensors.
The outdoor sensors are a ZigBee sensor, and some area sensors I snoop a few times an hour with an RTL-SDR radio single via MQTT bus. I have a helper that blends the weather service and local obs to compare with the thermostat. It bothers us every 2 hours to open some windows.
We both also have a bad habit of not closing the back door all the way, so the Assistant bugs us if a door or window is open for more than 10 minutes and the outdoor temperature is below the heating setpoint, or above the cooling setpoint. It turns off the HVAC a few minutes later if the condition persists and sends a snarky notification about not being made of enough money to fix climate change. However, it will turn the heat back on to 60F if the house falls below 58F and send notifications every hour til the condition is addressed.
Otherwise the ecobee does a fair job adjusting itself to maintain a desired inside temp on its own.