VentWise is a Home Assistant custom integration that suggests when opening or closing windows may improve indoor comfort. It is beta software and provides recommendations only: always check the actual conditions before acting. Read the safety notice before using it in a real home.
You need a working Home Assistant installation and at least one Home Assistant
weather entity. For useful room-level recommendations, prepare one indoor
temperature sensor and one indoor humidity sensor for each room you want to
configure.
VentWise does not directly open or close windows, change a thermostat, or replace a safety, weather-protection, or security system. If you opt in to room automations, VentWise runs the selected automation only after your explicit confirmation in a Companion App notification.
This is the easiest installation method when HACS is already installed.
- Open the button from a device and browser that can reach your Home Assistant instance.
- Let HACS add or open the VentWise custom repository.
- Select Download and choose the latest stable release.
- Restart Home Assistant if HACS asks you to do so.
- Go to Settings > Devices & services > Add integration, search for VentWise, and complete the setup.
VentWise can be installed this way before it appears in HACS's public catalogue. HACS still asks for your confirmation; the button never installs or restarts anything silently.
Use this method when you do not use HACS.
-
Download
ventwise.zipfrom the latest GitHub release. -
In your Home Assistant configuration directory, create this path if it does not already exist:
custom_components/ventwise/ -
Extract the contents of
ventwise.zipdirectly into thatventwisedirectory. -
Restart Home Assistant.
-
Add VentWise from Settings > Devices & services > Add integration.
The Home Assistant configuration directory is commonly /config on Home
Assistant OS, the directory mounted as /config for Container installations,
and ~/.homeassistant for Home Assistant Core. Use the directory configured
for your own installation if it differs.
The setup form asks for:
- a Home Assistant weather entity;
- your preferred indoor comfort temperature and humidity;
- whether to use the climate-adaptive comfort target;
- a stability delay before sending recommendations; and
- optional notification devices or Home Assistant persistent notifications.
After initial setup, open Configure on the VentWise integration to add a room. Give it a clear name and select its indoor temperature and humidity sensors. You can add, edit, disable, or remove rooms later from the same menu. If your room has door or window contacts, select them in the room form as well. VentWise treats the room as open when any selected contact is open, and only asks you to open or close windows when that action has not already happened. The room's Window state entity shows whether the contacts are open, closed, unavailable, or not configured.
VentWise exposes its recommendation and supporting measurements through Home Assistant entities. Check the recommendation before opening or closing a window. A recommendation can be delayed by the configured stability period, quiet hours, cooldown, missing data, or a disabled room.
When the outdoor temperature can correct the room only temporarily, VentWise can recommend brief ventilation instead of leaving a window open. In that case, air the room for about 10 minutes, close the window, and check the sensor again. The duration is a conservative reminder rather than a calculation of your home's heat-transfer rate; VentWise does not control or verify the window. Its comfort score also treats temperatures below 18 °C and above 26 °C as health-relevant conditions, even if a personal comfort target is outside that range.
Use Configure on the integration to change comfort values, notification settings, weather source, outdoor-data overrides, quiet hours, or rooms. The climate-adaptive option changes only VentWise's recommendation target; it does not change a thermostat or HVAC setpoint.
The VentWise device includes a Receive recommendation now button. Use it when you want an immediate answer to “what is best right now?” It refreshes the available weather and room data and sends the current advice to the configured notification targets without waiting for the regular notification cooldown or stability interval. For each actionable room, the notification is the same as a regular VentWise recommendation and includes a Companion App confirmation button when that room has an automation configured. Pressing this device button never runs an automation by itself.
Enable Debug mode in VentWise settings only when testing notifications or automations. Each room then exposes Receive open notification and Receive close notification controls. They send the normal operational notification with the requested action, bypassing notification timing and without suppressing later real recommendations. A Companion App confirmation is valid for 15 minutes and can run the configured room automation even when the current recommendation differs; its own conditions still apply. Disable Debug mode when testing is complete to remove these controls from every room.
For a room's open or close automation, select at least one Home Assistant Companion App notification device. A matching recommendation includes a confirmation button that is valid for 15 minutes and runs the automation only if the same recommendation is still current. VentWise respects the automation's own conditions. Persistent Home Assistant notifications and non-Companion notification services cannot confirm or trigger an automation.
With HACS, open VentWise in HACS and select Update when an update is
available, then restart Home Assistant if requested. With manual installation,
download the newer ventwise.zip, replace the integration files in
custom_components/ventwise/, and restart Home Assistant.
Back up your Home Assistant configuration before a manual update. VentWise migrates its own stored configuration when needed; if a migration cannot be performed safely, it keeps the entry unchanged and reports the problem in the Home Assistant logs.
- Remove the VentWise integration entry from Settings > Devices & services.
- If you used HACS, remove VentWise from HACS as well.
- For a manual installation, delete only
custom_components/ventwise/from your Home Assistant configuration directory. - Restart Home Assistant.
Removing the integration stops its recommendations. Review any automations, dashboards, or notifications that refer to VentWise entities after removal.
VentWise records setup failures, notification-delivery failures, and changes in the availability of the data it needs in the Home Assistant log. Normal recommendation changes, a disabled integration, and optional forecast data are not errors. Log entries are deliberately limited to diagnostic context and do not include credentials or sensor values, but Home Assistant logs can still contain personal information from other integrations.
For a problem that is already visible, open Settings > System > Logs and
look for VentWise or custom_components.ventwise. Home Assistant retains a
short list of recent warnings and errors there, with a full raw log available
from the same page.
For a problem that needs more detail:
- Go to Settings > Devices & services, open the VentWise integration, and use the three-dot menu to select Enable debug logging.
- Reproduce the problem once, noting the approximate time.
- Return to the same menu, select Disable debug logging, then download or copy the relevant log entries from Settings > System > Logs.
If the integration menu is unavailable, temporarily add this to
configuration.yaml, restart Home Assistant, reproduce the problem, then
remove the entry (or change it back to warning) and restart again:
logger:
logs:
custom_components.ventwise: debugOpen a GitHub issue with:
- VentWise and Home Assistant versions;
- the weather and room sensor types involved, without their real names;
- clear steps to reproduce, expected behavior, actual behavior, and the time it occurred; and
- only the relevant, sanitized VentWise log lines and traceback.
Never publish credentials, access tokens, exact address information, device identifiers, entity IDs that reveal personal details, complete configuration files, or an unfiltered full Home Assistant log.