Between times?

📐 Rule Machine®
1

I am creating a rule that sets the thermostat to heat when I leave work and have two questions.

  1. How do I make a condition that is between 2 times? I want it to run between 4:00 and 7:00.

  2. I am using NST Manager to control my nest thermostat, what setting should I change to turn off eco mode on the thermostat without changing the mode from Away?

2

First, if you haven't looked at the built-in Thermostat Scheduler app, I'd suggest you consider that first to see if it can do what you want without resorting to the complexity of Rule Machine.

Creating a condition for between two times in Rule Machine is pretty simple: it's phrased almost exactly like that in the UI. Choose "Time of Day," and you can probably figure it out from there (turn on "Turn on for between two times," then put in whatever you want for "starting at" and "ending at").

Since you're having difficulty, I suspect you might be trying to do this in a trigger. If you're used to Rule 3.0 and earlier, Rule 4.0 is a bit different: your actions run whenever your trigger fires. To get different actions depending on certain conditions, you can use conditionals (such as the above) in your actions. Conditionals are IFs and similar statements that can, as their name suggests, conditionally execute (or not) certain sections of code.

Thus, one way you could do this is something like:

Triggers: Time is 2:00 PM OR Time is 4:00 PM

Actions:

IF (Time is Between 2:00 PM and 3:59 PM) THEN
  do something
ELSE
  do something else
END-IF

Alternatively, you may wish to consider just using a delay of wait instead. Here's a delay example:

Triggers: Time is 2:00 PM

Actions:

Do something
Delay 02:00:00 
Do something else

Without knowing exactly what you want to do, it's hard to give specifics; hopefully this at least points you in the general direction of what is possible.

As for the NST Manager question, I don't use that, so hopefully someone else can answer there for however long that integration keeps working).