One of the goals of a smarter home should be to save money and the environment.
One of the areas we have looked at was then to make sure that the heating of the house was made a little smarter.
It is a relatively simple matter to only adjust the heat on a panel heater / radiator at certain times of the day – this will to a certain extent mean that you save some money and you are a little more environmentally conscious. But there are opportunities to make it a little smarter than that.
Among other things, there is little point in throwing money out the window when heating a room. So one of the things you should have on all exterior doors / windows is a sensor that you can tell if the window / door is open / closed.
When one window (or exterior door / porch door) opens, we stop the heating of the room. When we close the window / door, then we want heating should continue where it left off – that is, with the same temperature value.
To do that, we have created two automation. One for when the window / door opens, and one for when it closes again.
The trigger in this example is the Porch door. When it opens, the automation should startv
Then we have to save the temperature of the radiator. All our radiators have a smart valve, which allows us to control the temperature via the smart house. The Action is then to “Call service”, and to create a Scene. The scene takes a snapshot of the value of the entity, and we can use this value later on. Note, the Scene entity ID should be a unique name.
The next step in the automation is just to set the new value of the entity, in our example we set it to 4 degrees Celsius.
When the porch door closes, we must return to the original temperature value. The trigger is the same as the first automation – the door. When it closes, start the automation
The execution part of the automation is to run the sceene that we made in the first automation.
Now the temperature will be set back to what it was when the door was opend.