One of the slightly questionable things you can do once you have Home Assistant running is start automating things that already worked perfectly fine.

In my case: floor heating.

The existing setup worked. It had physical thermostats in the rooms. You pressed the buttons, the floor got warmer. Simple, reliable, and completely understandable to anyone who walked into the house.

Naturally, I decided to replace that with software.

Part of the motivation was aesthetic. Those thermostats are usually not particularly nice looking. Big plastic boxes with a bunch of buttons that stick out anywhere it's located. Functional, sure, but not exactly subtle.

The idea was to remove the visible controls and let the system manage temperature instead.

Enter the IKEA TIMMERFLOTTE temperature sensor. It’s Matter compatible, small, and fairly inexpensive, which makes it perfect for this kind of project where you mostly want data and don’t want to spend a fortune on every room.

So now the sensors report the temperature to Home Assistant, and the heating gets controlled from there. Schedules, automations, the usual things.

It works surprisingly well.

But it also raises a question: why are thermostats either extremely simple or extremely complicated?

I don’t want a giant touchscreen on the wall. I don’t want menus, apps, accounts, or voice assistants baked into the thermostat itself.

All I want is a small puck on the wall that you can rotate.

Turn it a little bit clockwise: warmer. Turn it back: cooler.

That’s it.

No screen (except maybe two small 7-segment digits you can see through the plastic, like the IKEA one). No cloud service. No animations. Just a simple control that stays out of the way until you need it.

Modern smart home devices often feel like they want to become a central part of your daily life. I’d rather they didn’t.

Good controls should disappear most of the time and only become noticeable when you actually need them.

Until someone (or I) makes that simple rotating puck, I guess Home Assistant will have to do.

Ciao.