I’ve been experimenting with setting up a monitor-only thermostat in my home, and I’m really curious to hear others’ experiences with this approach. For those who might not be familiar, a monitor-only thermostat allows you to track temperature and heating/cooling states without actually controlling the connected device. This setup can be incredibly useful for maintaining an overview of your home’s climate without direct intervention, which is perfect for those who prefer manual adjustments or have a separate system managing temperature control. My journey began with integrating a sensor-based system to monitor my water heater. I’ve been using sensor.temperature to track the temperature and binary_sensor.heater_is_on to monitor the heating state. The goal was to display all this information neatly in a climate entity, which I then wanted to showcase in the Thermostat and Entity Cards interface. The ability to view historical data has been a huge plus, providing valuable insights into temperature trends over time. However, I’ve hit a bit of a snag in achieving this setup. While I can successfully control a heater using the Generic Thermostat integration, I’m struggling to figure out how to configure it purely for monitoring purposes. I’ve read that setting the hvac_mode to auto might be the key, as it indicates that the thermostat should monitor without controlling. Unfortunately, the Generic Thermostat doesn’t support this setting, which has been a bit of a roadblock. On the other hand, my Hive integration seems to handle this functionality seamlessly. It effortlessly combines monitoring and control, which is exactly what I’m aiming for with my water heater setup. This has made me wonder if there’s a way to replicate this behavior using other integrations or perhaps through custom scripts. If anyone out there has successfully implemented a monitor-only thermostat or has tips on how to achieve this, I’d be thrilled to hear from you! Whether it’s through specific configurations, workarounds, or even custom automation scripts, your insights would be invaluable. Let’s collaborate to make this setup as smooth and effective as possible for everyone!