what does the 'call_for_heat' attribute do?

[Tall-Paul]

I can see on the better thermostat entity there's an attribute 'call_for_heat'. I was hoping this would be something I could use to simply determine whether the thermostat is calling for heat.....so if the mode is set to heat, and the temperature is lower than the setpoint this should be true and false at all other times.

However it doesn't seem to work like that from my testing.

Also, if that is how this is supposed to work, it would be even better if this was exposed as an entity....so you could use the ui to create a group of this entity, and then use that to turn a boiler on / off without having to mess around with templates and yaml and whatnot.

[Gnarfoz]

What you're looking for is hvac_action. "Summer mode" was renamed to call_for_heat at some point. I'm not sure why or what the meaning of "call for heat" is supposed to be. As far as I understand it, "summer mode" means that the outside temperature is higher than the given threshold (default is 20 °C, I think), disabling heating.