I have got most things up and running. Today I got a z-wave thermostat and hooked it up w/o issue.
now the programming challenge.
I have a zooz scene controller by the back door and have it such that if i push one of the buttons, it means there will be nobody home. I have two basic rules set up one for day time and another for night time. now I want to change the thermostat based on winter/summer to set heat/cool
so i have two rules
Nobody Home - between sunrise and sunset
Nobody Home - between sunset and sunrise
now with thermo i am thinking, hopefully wrong, i will have to create two more rules
You can do this with rules, but have you thought about using the Thermostat Scheduler app? It can do what you're asking and more and might be easier to set up. It may work best if you use hub modes (one or more of which can be tied to presence, often some combination of that plus time of day), though you can also make it work strictly with time periods, too. On a related note: you can use Mode Manager (or a rule) to change modes with buttons too, so you can still make that work even though Thermostat Scheduler doesn't (I think...) support buttons directly.
Virtual switches (or hub variables or any number of ways to track whatever you want) can be used for things too; one advantage of modes is that it's a longstanding (there since the beginning) platform-level feature that many apps have a way to take advantage of. Thermostat Scheduler is one of these apps. Rule Machine also has actions like "switches per mode" where you can turn on/off certain switches based on the current mode (without needing to build in conditional actions where you could do this, or something equivalent based on virtual switch or other states, yourself).
Ultimately, what you think works best is up to you. You can certainly use rules instead of Thermostat Scheduler and whatever you want--or nothing at all--instead of modes. Lots of people just happen to like them for these reasons.
