I've been reading a lot of posts out there regarding modes. I was curious how you handle mode changes? I currently deal with modes in RM4 and I have 4 modes (soon to be 5 as I'm doing some customization for my cleaning lady). Home, Quiet Time, Night, and Away. Night, quiet time and home are solely based on our qi chargers in our bedroom. Home to away and away to home is governed by life360 presence. I did this to eliminate the guess work for routines. Most of my rules revolve around room presence and device usage per room based on mode. I actually like my house to still interact somewhat normally even if we're not home. Giving the allusion that someone is there. The dogs help with that. I wondered if my outlook on this could be improved upon. So I'm curious about your set ups. I can certainly give a play by play of my house and what I do with modes, but I left it out for now. (mainly because I'm at work and only have a few minutes to throw this question out there). TIA
You know I just have to jump in on this... I think I'm going to change my name to Mr. Mode Manager. 
So, I have 6 basic modes (Early Morning, Morning, Afternoon, Evening, Night and Overnight). Each one has a corresponding Home and Away variation. I do all my rules based upon what mode it is. For my outside lights, to give the appearance that we are home, the lights don't change if we are home or not aside from motion. So, if the mode if Home - Night, the outside lights are at 75%. If motion triggers, then they raise to 100% and my cameras start recording. All the outdoor lights turn off when the mode changes to Home - Early Morning or Away - Early Morning.
For my interior lights, I set the lights according to mode as well, but I introduce some randomness for the away modes. All my fish tank lights turn on and off according to Early Morning (for my corals) and Morning for my other tanks and then turn off when the mode switches to evening.
During overnight mode, lights all turn on dimmed and have much reduced timers as opposed to other modes.
Doing it this way, I don't have to let anything besides Mode Manager worry about times and I don't have to do many, if any, time calculations in RM rules.
I don't use Mode. Maybe I'm Mr Anti-Mode ?? 
I have Mode Manager installed and configured. I use it to test HubConnect's ability to pass Mode around. I verify that it does, and that's it.
Mode, for me, is an alias to "at this time" -- and that's what I use instead. All my Rules that have a need for time, I just use time.
Mode also has "Away" which is an alias to "presence" and it's extension "Everyone/No one Present". As you could predict, I just use presence.
We should totally do name changes for Halloween 
I have modes but I use them for "Potential" occupancy. Awake, Home, Away, Sleep, Vacation. Then I global variables for Time Of Day: Dawn, Day, Dusk, Night. By combining the mode with time of day I set various scenes in each of my rooms.
I have four modes: Home, Evening, Asleep, and Away.
Evening is the simplest. It's triggered at 10 minutes before sunset, except if mode is already Away. It's also triggered if I come home between sunset -10 minutes and sunrise +10 minutes.
Away is triggered when I leave. I use the iOS app for presence, and my backup is the Alexa app which has been solid about presence for ages. Alexa throws a switch when I leave, and Mode manager uses that switch to determine Away.
Home is triggered when I tell Alexa "good morning," (Alexa throws a switch), or if I come home during the day.
Asleep is triggered when I tell Alexa "good night." and Alexa throws a switch.
My husband and I aren't creatures of habit. Bedtime is anywhere between 8pm and 1am most days. His only request when I started this hobby is that he was NOT going to talk to puck and he was NOT going to do any dancing to get things to turn on and off. So I often wonder if my modes will cover everything.
I like to keep things simple for that reason. I have 4 modes mostly dictated by the state of two modified qi chargers. They trigger night and quiet time when one or two phones are docked and go back to home when both phones change to undocked. Quiet time is in the middle for morning and evening when one of us has gone to bed or is still in bed. Away is self explanatory and arriving home are both triggered by presence. So my modes are Quiet time, Night, home, and away. Most automations that use time, illuminance, or triggers aren't based on mode. So I want my house to interact with us. So, I just wonder if there's something that I'm missing because I have such a simple setup. Looking at the replies, I can see that I might be on track with our needs. Unless there's something that works better set up differently?
I am a user of modes. Sets how the overall lighting effects will be throughout the house. Such as lights near kids room dimming to a certain % based on mode.
Here is a graphic on how I deal with my modes that I posted above. Hubitat modes are sorta fixed on how we may occupy the house. They tend to have a preset time. The flags (Boolean) I use are based on day/night/sunrise/sunset and sunlight conditions. Since light changes in seasons I decided to combine the Boolean with mode. For example longest day of the year when the mode is awake day is in effect and no need to pre-light the house. In winter then the awake mode is set and it still may be night or Dawn and the house is pre-lit.
I carried this technique over from the days I had a StarGate with x-10 devices. I used a lot of static time variables and calculations on sunrise/sunset/Dawn/Dusk. Dawn/Dusk was very complex math due to the angle of the sun but I haven't yet replicated that in Hubitat yet. I never got around to in on the SmartThings either but I it on my todo list for a winter project.
Also the Home/Away is just a representation of the full time block it will toggle back and forth during those times based on occupancy.
Sunrise-Sunset.org will supply those values to you. You give it latitude and longitude and in return, get:
Luxuriant-Driver acquires those then slices and dices the day into segments and calculates a Lux value based on time and which segment of the day. Optionally, it will factor in cloud coverage.
In other words, your winter project may in fact be done. 
