James Leighton

Another post in my series of ‘if I don’t document it, I will forget how to do this again in 2 years time!

I recently wanted a visual indicator as to whether the temperature in our home was rising and falling. This is possible with Home Assistant but the configuration is a bit cumbersome (like most of Home Assistant, honestly…)

To start with, take note of the names of the temperature sensors you want to create Rising/Falling entities for. In my case, I will be creating three for bedroom, living room, and study.

Take your three temperature sensors, and create a trend entity for each within your configuration.yaml file:

binary_sensor:
  - platform: trend
    sensors:
      trend_living_temp:
        entity_id: sensor.temperature_living_room_temperature
      trend_bedroom_temp:
        entity_id: sensor.temperature_bedroom
      trend_study_temp:
        entity_id: sensor.temperature_office_temperature

This will create an ‘on/off’ trend sensor which shows ‘on’ if the temperature is raising and off if the temperature is falling. You can set a minimum change on the trend sensor so minor fluctations are ignored, but the default configuration works for me.

Now we will use this to create a template sensor for each new trend sensor. This will let us customise the text so it says Rising or Falling and also allow us to set a custom entity icon. Once again, this goes in your configuration.yaml file.

template:
  - sensor:
      - name: "xStudyTrend"
        state: >
          {% if is_state('binary_sensor.trend_study_temp', 'on') %}
            Rising
          {% else %}
            Falling
          {% endif %}
        icon: > 
          {% if is_state('binary_sensor.trend_study_temp', 'on') %} 
            mdi:thermometer-chevron-up
          {% else %} 
            mdi:thermometer-chevron-down
          {% endif %}
          
      - name: "xLivingRoomTrend"
        state: >
          {% if is_state('binary_sensor.trend_living_temp', 'on') %}
            Rising
          {% else %}
            Falling
          {% endif %}
        icon: >
          {% if is_state('binary_sensor.trend_living_temp', 'on') %}
            mdi:thermometer-chevron-up
          {% else %}
            mdi:thermometer-chevron-down
          {% endif %}
          
      - name: "xBedroomTrend"
        state: >
          {% if is_state('binary_sensor.trend_bedroom_temp', 'on') %}
            Rising
          {% else %}
            Falling
          {% endif %}
        icon: >
          {% if is_state('binary_sensor.trend_bedroom_temp', 'on') %}
            mdi:thermometer-chevron-up
          {% else %}
            mdi:thermometer-chevron-down
          {% endif %}

If the trend sensor is ‘on’, then the template will return ‘Rising’ and set the icon to ‘mdi:thermometer-chevron-up’. In all other cases, it will return ‘Falling’ and set the icon to ‘mdi:thermometer-chevron-down’.

Make sure all your conditional statements refer to the correct sensor! You might pull your hair out for half an hour if you don’t…. :)