Before putting too much thought to this a couple offerings/questions.
Shouldnât you know when the renters are arriving and departing assuming short term bnb type situation? I have time and date variables to make sure the system arms if the family forget and I wonât be home for a while. Especially when there isnât a set schedule of those being home and leaving. There are a couple lock outs to this as well that I can go into if thereâs further interest.
Without knowing a specific schedule, I feel youâre concerned that the systems wonât be armed soon enough to their actual departure. The issue I see here is what youâve stated, how long is long enough not seeing sensor action to know theyâve actually left for the end of the rental. I would say this could be 18-24 hours. One could set up a motion detector group and make decision from there, but again is that pesky time delay.
If a long term lease type situation, I agree with the previous question, are you paying for utilities? And if so, where do I sign up? Would you, in this setting, be best to incentivize them to use a keypad to arm the system when gone and disarm when home? Even so, theyâd be coming home to a warm house if you control the house based on rules that require their presence to activate.
Lastly to your specific question, there are timers in the way that you can have something activate or wait for a period of time in rules. My âfrustrationâ was to have a readout of that time to know when it would expire so I did a variable and loop tied to the rule that would update every minute and adjust the variable to n-1 each go around. Once n=0 something happens.
The problem is that yes--we pay the utilities on the house and we like to have the security system turn on when people are not there. The cleaning people are supposed to arm the security system, but they rarely do. The goal here is to give the renters complete control while they are in the house, but to simply change the thermostats to an energy saving temperature when the place is vacant between rentals. The program I am trying to create would instantly put the thermostats in an initial comfortable room temperature setting as soon as a door is opened or motion is detected when a renter first arrives. After that, the renters can set the system to whatever they want. I just want to make sure they are really gone as opposed to going out on an all day excursion such as white water rafting before moving the system to an energy saving mode.
Cleaning people are supposed to put the thermostats at an energy saving temperature when they leave the house after a given rental, but they don't do it a lot of the time. There can be extended periods of time such as a week or two when the cabin is vacant and who wants to pay to keep it at the last setting of a renter through these periods?
I am toying with the idea of automatically turning off the AC if doors are open for more than 5 minutes or something like that--unfortunately this happens a lot--renters crank the air but open the door to experience the mountain air or whatever. I would create a sign by the thermostat that has a light that lights up when this condition happens to let them know why the AC turned off.
Frankly, I did not consider whether there might be a law against this, but I will look that up for my state to make sure.
Kryzes--I agree with you that an 18-24 hour time period is probably appropriate. My thinking is we can put a sign near the thermostats that indicates if the house is left vacant for X hours, the thermostats will revert to energy savings settings. I can look up when people are supposed to be in the house on our rental agency website, but that means I will have to manually take care of this function as the rental agency website is not going to be able to send some sort of signal to our hubitat. It would take a bit of programming for me to check their website to see what is going on each day because vacation rentals change daily.
Right now I struggle as to how to set up a time delay. And the trigger is an absence of activity, not a change in state of a device. Still trying to figure this out. If there was a timer in Hubitat, I would have the timer reset when presence is detected (or at least wait for an hour or something to reset it so it is not being constantly reset.) When the timer reached the present number of hours (18-24 hours), I would switch to energy savings mode.
All good on the rental, when I went back and looked I wasnât entirely sure the direction. I guess Iâm stuck paying my utilities for a while longer.
I will get doors and windows via the Konnected product--planning to install that. I have switches in the house for various lights. I also have motion detectors to detect whether someone is in the house as part of the security. I am planning on moving over to the Noonlight monitoring because I can save $30 a month on that. Just need to figure out how to switch the mode of the system from Home to Away appropriately. I talked with the rental agency and they are interested in having visibility on all this. They often get a call when a renter enters the house and the alarm goes off and they are too freaked out to figure out how to enter the code into the keypad to turn it off. If the agency was able to do this remotely, they would like to have that capability.
I like that--I think that might be the solution I am looking for! The triggers could be more that motion sensors I should think. I did not see how to get the "inactive and stays that way for X time" part set up when I was trying to set up a rule though. I will have to figure it out.
I would create another rule that would place the system into HOME mode when activity or motion is detected.
So, I have something similar. I have this, which could be easily extrapolated. Rich closet is a door sensor, master closet is a bulb. Another rule turns the light on from the contact sensor. Door opens, light turns on and starts a timer. This rule Door closed, light off and stops timer. If door is left open, in 8 minutes it turns off.
Warning: Long, rambling post with absolutely no technical solution (but a bit of commiserating). We have a guest house on our property here on the "lake island" in Maine, and my wife rents it out as a weekly rental through one of those vacation home rental services, from about June - Sep. It pays for the upgrades to the property that she seems to find we need every year, so it's a decent tradeoff, I suppose. When it funds my new barn I'll become a fan. But I digress...
I, too, find that some guests have the maddening habit of turning on the AC and opening slider doors and windows simultaneously, because there are apparently large slices of the population who do not understand how AC, doors, and windows operate together. We rented the place out only once in October, and had a guy who cranked the heat up to 80 while he walked around in shorts and a T-shirt, while it was down to the teens at night. I've tried writing rules that make announcements when a door is left open and the AC is on, but inevitably a wireless sensor will fail to register a close, and then the one person who actually did close the door will be falsely accused of bad behavior (not good for guest relations). Wired sensors are more reliable, but I've yet to find a truly reliable way to tie our wired alarm system to Hubitat (the Eyez-On system being truly horrible and basically worthless). It also becomes expensive and somewhat unsightly to put a sensor on every casement window that might be left open.
So... I basically just "grin and bear it", putting the house in "Occupied" mode on the date the guests arrive, and "Away" mode on the data and time they must be out, and leave it at that. I had my wife raise rates a bit as a sort of "stupidity tax", and that didn't seem to phase the number of people who rent the place, so now I feel better about it. I'll keep watching this thread in case someone comes up with a good solution, but I think this is one of those situations that begs for charging more and worrying less. It sure helped me.
I do that in my own home. We often go sit on the front porch and get lazy about shutting the door behind us. So if the AC is on (window units in my case) and the door is left open for 5 minutes it shuts down the AC units and uses the Alexa on the porch to tell us HE is saving the planet by shutting down the AC. I think if you cast it in terms of saving the environment you'll meet less resistance
I recently moved into a rental house after living in my own house for years so I have that on my brain. @ATLWorkshop went above and beyond explaining when he was under no obligation to go into that much detail. I appreciate that vs telling me to pound sand.
Do you know about the Konnected product? If you have an existing security system with window and door sensors, you can tap into those. However, if there is no existing system in the house, then please ignore this post. Our house does have these features. Sometimes a renter actually leaves a door open--which lets in critters if the door is open for a long time. By using Hubitat with Konnected, I can monitor the state of the doors and windows. Also, I am seeing about giving access to this info to the rental agency so they can make sure everything is closed up when a renter leaves.
I have only passing familiarity with Konnected, but may try it once this guest season is over. Thanks for the suggestion!
In previous homes I used an Elk M1 Gold system, and loved it in both locations. But no local alarm companies could support it in our rural area, and as I get older I think more about how my wife would need to have things maintained if I'm out of the picture, so I opted for a more "conventional" system, maintained by the largest alarm company in our area, Expensive JUNK, in my view. More problems in the past two years than I had with my Elk systems in two homes and nearly 20 years. Anyway, despite that, it should work with Konnected, so that's the likely path. Thanks again.
