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.
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…
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.
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:
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).