[RebeccaTheDev]

This is what I did to control an DeLonghi electric oil radiator in my home office. And since it takes a couple hours to warm up, I have it connected to Home Assistant to turn on a couple hours before my workday starts - and also sync'd to my work calendar so it doesn't do it on days I'm not working. And then turn off again at the end of the day.

Ended up setting it up as a virtual thermostat along with a Zigbee temperature sensor and letting HA manage the the whole thing. After a few months of hacking and tweaking, it works pretty well!

But, there were a few problems with this approach:

* The IR code to turn on and turn off were the same code (which makes sense if you look at the unit, there's just an on-off toggle button)

* No temperature control. On the heater itself, you can adjust the temperature as well as a high/medium/low setting. The remote didn't have these settings, so I couldn't capture them using an IR receiver sensor. Thankfully, these settings persist when the unit is off so I just set them once and called it good enough. And I eventually got around the need for this by setting up the virtual thermostat with a Zigbee temperature sensor in the room.

But the biggest problem is that I had no way to know if the unit was actually ON.

The codes sometimes wouldn't work unless the IR blaster was pointed directly at the unit, and even then they will sometimes randomly fail. I ended up plugging it into a Zigbee plug with power monitoring, so I could tell from the power draw if it was on, and try to re-send the commands a few times if it failed to turn on.

Overall, it was kind of a fun way to make a dumb device smart, but what OOP is doing is way cooler.

[brk]

Home Assistant supports a variety of plug-in watt meters. I have some smart plugs that have a current meter built in, you wouldn't need to use the On/Off of the plug, just have Home Assistant read the current power consumption value and branch your logic from there.

[RebeccaTheDev]

Exactly what I'm doing. I even set it up as a separate binary sensor using a template.

[mianos]

I have one of those little Xiaomi LCD temperature meters in the room as well.

I actually have more than one LED on my device. It's in the opposite corner and points to the air-conditioning unit that is fixed. In this scenario I can't ever recall it not working 100%.

My automation is in nodered and I heat or cool the bedroom to 18C and turn the the unit off.