Per-room outdoor temperature thresholds

[snazzybean]

Right now the outdoor cooling/heating cutoffs (outdoor_cooling_min, outdoor_heating_max) live in global settings. That assumption holds for a typical house where every room has similar thermal behavior, but it breaks as soon as one room is an outlier.

The use case

A garage that heats up from solar gain or equipment, even when it's cold outside. At 13°C outdoor, you want that room allowed to cool, but you don't want your living room AC turning on at the same outdoor temperature.

If you lower the global threshold to unblock the garage, you've also unlocked cooling for every other room, which isn't what you want.

What could work

Two approaches I'm weighing:

A) Per-room overrides of the global values
Empty = inherit global, filled = override. Fits well with how most other settings work in RoomMind.

B) A critical failsafe temperature per room
Something like "never let this room go above X or below Y", which bypasses the outdoor gate the same way a manual override does. Maybe closer to how people actually think about the problem? ("I just don't want the garage above 25°C, ever").

I think A would fit best with a default of "inherit global", but open to feedback.

[eiriklid]

What is the use case for the outdoor threshold in the first place?

Is it to cover some missing modeling in the MPC where it doesn't understand that the room will revert to mean by itself?

[wwmcmanus]

One use case is I don't want my outdoor A/C compressor turning on when the outdoor temperature is very low (and risk freezing or damaging the gas lines).

[DrieWielRr]

Yes, I like B a lot to but I think you should put that as a sepperate idea because B is more like a worst-case scenario fixer where one can specify absolute min/max temperatures for a room that will override anything (even current selected mode) to make sure a room never crosses that threshold.

So I'd go for A as well to fix the problem, it grants more per-room control depending on the outdoor temps. I would have loved to help you out but I'm a C# programmer, but I'll fork the repo, give it a go and see if I can cleanly implement this into your current code.

[wwmcmanus]

For me global is fine--but I see the utility of "A". I think B can be implemented as an additional feature-- I see it as very useful for freeze protection if you have a garage or lesser used room our building where you want to make sure you have enough minimal heating to keep the pipes from freezing.