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Better Thermostat

Degraded mode

Better Thermostat raises a degraded mode repair issue when one or more of its configured sensors become unavailable — the room temperature sensor, a window sensor, a humidity sensor, an outdoor sensor, or the weather entity.

Better Thermostat keeps controlling your heating in degraded mode: if the room temperature sensor is unavailable it falls back to the TRV’s internal temperature reading, and unavailable optional sensors are simply left out of the control decisions. Expect less accurate control until all sensors are back.

During Home Assistant startup, sensors are often briefly unavailable while their integrations load. Better Thermostat waits out a grace period before raising the issue, so a warning means a sensor stayed unavailable beyond startup.

Common causes

  • The sensor’s battery is empty or the device lost its radio connection.
  • The integration providing the sensor is not loaded or failed to start.
  • The sensor was renamed or removed, so the entity id Better Thermostat was configured with no longer exists.

How to fix it

  1. The repair issue lists the unavailable sensors. Check each one under Settings → Devices & services: replace the battery or reconnect the device if needed.
  2. If an entity id changed, update the Better Thermostat configuration to the new entity id (open the Better Thermostat entry and reconfigure it).
  3. The issue clears on its own once all sensors are available again.