I’m wondering if there is a way to initiate a Home Automation below a certain temperature (e.g. from Carrot) without buying a HomeKit temperature sensor?
Not from Carrot, but you can use HomeBridge and a weather plugin to get the data into HomeKit, and then you’d need something like the Home+ app or the Eve app to set up the trigger (because HomeKit supports it, but doesn’t let you directly use it). HomeBridge is free - if you have an always on machine. If you don’t then something like a Pi Zero W would be perfect for this, and it’s not very expensive! Though this may end up being a gateway drug into lots of other automations (dummy switches are one of my favourites).
Thanks Rose, I think that if I was going to do all of that, it would be simpler to buy a temperature sensor. 
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Well HomeBridge can do more than outdoor temperature, it can do all sorts of things - like add Ring doorbells to HomeKit, and more. It depends on the scope of your desire. If you just want the outdoor weather you can grab a Netatmo weather station or something, but that will cost more money than a Pi Zero W and case (I have both, but they’re used differently.)
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I’m still trying to figure these out (the what and how)
Maybe something to explain in more detail in one of your blog posts?
I do plan to do a blog post on this, but there was a bug in HomeKit for a while which made some of my use cases break. Fortunately, it seems to be being fixed!
One example is “bedtime”, this is a switch I turn on when I go to bed, and turn off when I wake up (I trigger scenes using a button, and the state of the switch is set). When bedtime is on the motion sensor in my bedroom doesn’t turn on my lights. Sounds simple enough, but with a varied sleep schedule it’s not something that’s super easy to do in another way. It also dims other lights if they turn on - e.g. if I get up to go do something in my office, the hallway light will turn on, but dimly, and only a few of the lights in my office will auto turn on.
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