I’m finding my Sensi 2 thermostat is not getting all the modes from SmartThings to Home Assistant. I’m missing “Off” and “Emergency Heat”. I put in a ticket with SmartThings support and was basically told this sounds like a Home Assistant issue. Problem is, it’s not.
HA dev has noted on GitHub that they only can publish what is being sent to them.
Anybody have any suggestions of how I can get those missing modes over to Home Assistant or to get SmartThings support to not just blow this off as a “not my problem” sorta thing?
The developer over at HA would need to work on it with ST. You may want to see if he can reach out to them.
Sensi is cloud-to-cloud connection.
Login here:
Select the device, take screenshots from the summary, attributes and commands sections and post them here.
Edit: pretty sure that there’s a Sensi integration for HA. Would make much more sense to use that in parallel to the ST integration.
From what I’ve read on similar requests, that developer has straight up said it’s all on SmartThings. Like that is his response and then just closes out the GitHub issue.
I’ll look that link over a bit. There is an integration but it is not official. It runs through HACS which is a homegrown setup not officially tied to or supported by Home Assistant.
Other Sensi thermostats had Homekit and that natively integrates. Unfortunately mine does not. SmartThings is the only platform that it integrates with officially for automation outside of Google and Alexa.
This is what you can get through SmartThings:
This is what Home Assistant sees:
Somehow, some way, the “off” comes as an entity state and not a proper HVAC Mode. Emergency Heat just doesn’t exist.
Read my comment again and follow the link…
There’s usually an attribute that lists the supported modes of a thermostat. Would be interesting to see that (and the other stuff I’ve mentioned).
Assuming you mean these?
Those match up pretty well with the Home Assistant docs on what SHOULD come over.
… There’s also an Attributes section, that I’ve mentioned…
(My thermostat had a cooling command, but it’s a heating-only device. It has been fixed now, but who knows what’s going on in a cloud-to-cloud connection…)
Attributes:
Specifically:
As a further test, I put the thermostat into emergency heat mode to see what Home Assistant ssistant sees. It recognizes it just as regular Heat mode.
So, the Off will come through, but not as a Mode like it should per the docs. The Emergency Heat doesn’t come through at all.
I’ll try to find some free time to get all of this in an actual GitHub issue through Home Assistant to force them to comment on it. If they come back and tell me definitively that it is a SmartThings issue I will put in a new ticket with ST with links to the GitHub issue.
I’m not a fan of using any cloud to cloud connections like this but unfortunately Sensi doesn’t play nice with other companies.
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I the meantime, try out the HACS Sensi integration.
Yeah, was doing my best to avoid it only because if not an official integration, Home Assistant won’t pay any attention to it if they break it with an update. I’ve been burned in the past.
Same here on SmartThings with community edge drivers…
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I’ve been browsing the code for the integration. I’m not claiming understanding but the following seemed ‘interesting’.
MODE_TO_STATE = {
"auto": HVACMode.HEAT_COOL,
"cool": HVACMode.COOL,
"eco": HVACMode.AUTO,
"rush hour": HVACMode.AUTO,
"emergency heat": HVACMode.HEAT,
"heat": HVACMode.HEAT,
"off": HVACMode.OFF,
}
STATE_TO_MODE = {
HVACMode.HEAT_COOL: "auto",
HVACMode.COOL: "cool",
HVACMode.HEAT: "heat",
HVACMode.OFF: "off",
}
The supported thermostat modes seem to be translated using MODE_TO_STATE which doesn’t appear to differentiate between emergency heat and heat. That might have some bearing on why emergency heat has gone missing.
I haven’t chased the off further as I’m not a Home Assistant user.
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I’ve been reading a bit on GitHub and seeing multiple HVAC related issues getting reported to the Home Assistant dev recently since this new integration was created. All are ending up SmartThings issues that can’t be fixed from the HA side.
Hoping after work today that I can log an issue with proper logs of the device to see what the dev says. Then if he determines it a Samsung problem, I’ll resubmit another ticket.
Looking at the code, my inference was simply that HA’s model for ‘climate’ devices doesn’t include the emergency heating or rush hour modes so the integration was just working with what it has.
SmartThings has many other thermostat modes that it would appear aren’t handled by the integration at all.
Update:
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They allegedly accept anything sent in the thermostatMode field from what the docs say.
I’ll have to download my actual device logs on a computer to see what is actually being sent when changing the modes.
Thank you for takenaway the personal ticket that expires every 24 hours and keeping it permeant
Are most people using this integration during a transition to HASS from ST? I’m dabbling in HASS and set up a Zooz 800 as secondary on the ST network, and tried that route, but it’s very unreliable (when ZWJSUI is reset or HA is rebooted, all devices stop working and must be re-interviewed).
I personally used the old integration to transition away. I then added it back, and now this new version, when I bought a Samsung washer and dryer. I wanted the ability to get real automation capabilities with many platforms linked.
For example, when my dryer gets done I could have lights blink in multiple rooms of my house or in my garage, have a notification play through Google speakers, and send notifications to all of my devices like phones and tablets. Can you do much of these things through SmartThings itself? Probably. But I couldn’t when I migrated away.
I tried the integration out of curiosity with a virtual machine, just logged in with the Samsung account and all devices were imported, great!
Wanted to see if smart buttons were correctly exposed and, well… sort of. Turns out Home Assistant support for smart buttons is… not what you expect in a smart home platform.
While a smart button like a IKEA Styrbar or Rodret set in SmartThings will appear as a device in HA, it does not include the triggers for button presses in the device. Instead, it exposes each individual button as an Event entity and you use the event_type of the entity to know if it was pressed, held, etc.
Except the event_type does not change if you press a button two consecutive times, so your automation will not run the second time if you trigger by event_type.
That’s also a known issue with Matter buttons in Home Assistant since they use the same Event entity. The workaround is triggering by any changes to the Event entity and then checking the event_type attribute. The problem is the entity can change for more reasons that are not an actual button press so your automation may run when no button has been pressed. This is not desired at all.
For example, if you use a custom driver for the buttons that allows to change capabilities (like adding release actions or multi-tap), those additions will cause a change in the entity (event_types in this case) that will trigger your automations too even if there was no actual button press.
Another example is when Home Assistant restarts, automations will trigger even if the button was not pressed, because there was an availability state change in the entity. There are also workarounds for that.
TL;DR: Watch out when using smart buttons in Home Assistant, automating them correctly need lots of workarounds.
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