Now that I have presence working perfectly 99.9% of the time, here are a few things that take advantage of this.
Whenever the mode goes to away, several things happen...
Turn notifications to on for all cameras
If the Robot vacuum has not done his job today, start vacuuming the house
All thermostats will drop by 2°C for heating and go up by 2°C for AC
Make sure all lights that should not be on are turned off
When anyone comes back (mode changes from away)
Thermostats will go to there regular settings
If dark outside, entry lights will dim up for better lighting (they are usually at 40% when on) for 10 minutes.
If I am the one that arrived, notifications for the cameras are muted
If the Volt is the car that arrived, after 15 minutes it will check if the power plug to the car is pulling current, if not a notification is sent to whoever is home to make sure they did not forget to plug in the car (this one still needs some tweeking, some times it sends it to the wrong person) if we arrive almost at the same time with each of our cars but that's ok to.
Sometimes, you can't beat the functionality of a dumb device.
Once in a great while, my Schlage door locks just stop working, and won't work until I unplug the battery for a second. Happens on multiple devices, a few times a year. Has happened with multiple Schlage z-wave locks over the years.
A worthwhile investment IMO, no matter how much automation you have.
I keep a few of them in the garage for this reason. We have the keypad only Yale assure deadlocks.
That said, I only use digital deadlocks as additional security to the normal lock in the door handle. My wife never remembered to lock our deadlock, so automating them made a lot of sense.
Truer words have never been spoken!
And this is why I carry keys with me as if I had a regular lock (and from the outside, for all intents and purposes, it is a regular lock).
I'm only using the "smart" features to
tell me the door has been left unlocked
auto-lock the door when mode switches to "sleep" or alarm is set (alarm fob is on the keychain, so it's impossible to forget the keys when setting the alarm)
run various automations on unlock events
That's it. I did consider that "auto-locking after 15 minutes" rule, as @calinatl suggested, but I figured that it would increase the convenience factor by maybe 5-10%, but increase my stress level like 3x.
And, of course, all that can be alleviated by having a contingency plan (or multiple) with lockboxes, additional remotes, etc, but - sometimes less is more, and greatly increasing complexity just to gain those extra 5-10% of convenience are absolutely not worth it for me personally, but might absolutely be worth it for someone else.
Don't get me wrong - as an engineer, I love tinkering with stuff, but with home automation I often have to tell myself to slow down, otherwise my house would have already turned into a giant Rube Goldberg machine
I haven’t had a house key for the past 10 years I think… With 3 automated locks and one garage door opener, the chances that none will work is close to nil. The locks we have now don’t even have a key lock in them. They are just number pads. And there is a spot for a 9V battery on the bottom if the batteries ever go dead - we keep a spare outside in the mailbox next to the door in case we ever need it…
While I may add smart locks someday, for years I have made do with external garage door keypads to let me get inside without carrying keys. They are dumb, but they are extremely convenient and reliable.
I have a custom lighting app that controls all the lights in my home. It adjusts the lights based on mode and motion and works really well. Recently I have implemented an override feature. For example, if I am working outside I want the lights to stay on and not follow the motion sensors. I set a virtual switch and the app disregards the zone sensors.
My office is the only room in the house that doesn't have a conventional light switch so I use a button to toggle the override. This works great but I have no way of knowing what state the override is in. So I added a couple of lines to my RM toggle. It turns on a Third Reality Night Light for two seconds when I press the button. Red for override on and green for off. So I get a quick visual cue as to the state of the office.
For any other room I use Inovelli switches so I can show the state on the switch itself.
Like I said, not weird, but a simple indicator that increased usability greatly.
We have a watchdog 'Rover' (virtual presence) - used in combination with who else is home;
If Rover is not in his 'crate' (ie he is present), and my wife/kids are home without me, he 'barks' much more often at external triggers (doors/windows opening).
If we are ALL away, but guest presence is on (mainly inlaws and outlaws housesitting), and Rover is 'crated' (ie away) then main automations are paused, which lets them be all old school, manually toggle lights and so on.
If we are ALL away, no guests, and Rover is out of his crate - full alarm mode.
If we are away, and no guests, we can put Rover in his 'crate' for set periods, the house goes into Valet mode - (for the cleaner) - no alarm, but extended monitoring of certain cupboard doors/fridges and so on.
My fabulous and super-smart Wife occasionally struggles with extracting herself from the office on time. We use OwnTracks to determine which office/offsite location she is in - and then prompt her with the live journey time back in order to collect the kids on time.
Kids (who love reading) have a reward reading-timer built into their bedside buttons. If they respond to the bedtime notification promptly (put your PJs on) then they get extra time on the bedside reading lamp timer.
This is basically a garage door opener that you leave attached to the outside of the house, but to open the door you need to punch in a code instead of just pushing a single button. (Closing the door is done with just Enter.)
Some let you put in temporary codes that expire after a certain amount of time, or number of uses, so you can give people temporary access.
Thanks. I use a standard basic rfid keypad with a bit of botched webcore logic to make things more secure, I also have a standard wireless relay/keyfob.
I hoped your method was the equivalent of a wireless fob, activated by a keypad. Which in theory would be more secure than my keypad as there would be no need to expose dry contacts.
Sure - and let me know if you want more than this.
Owntracks will monitor your location every X seconds. You can also give the app key regions (Ive added all of my Wife's office locations, main training sites etc). Each time she arrives at a region, or the location changes, (and then remains unchanged for a period) I run a GET google maps API query, for journey time/route home. A piston then uses this to calculate an early time (unless location changes) to rerun the query for a live journey time (which is usally more with rush hour traffic, hence running it early) and it messages her with the info. If she doesnt leave, it messages again, more urgently (which she uses to excuse herself - 'I have to go, see'). For certain offices, with really bad traffic issues, The piston runs the query periodically, watching for 'and they shut the tunnel...' that wouldnt be caught in time if left to expected journey time.
The win is the reminder of journey time based on current location. She is an optimist, and thinks everywhere is 20 minutes.
True, but it requires an add-on to make it universal. Seems that direct compatibility does not require an add on, which is around an extra 40 quid here.
Ideally I just need to duplicate the way my generic fob/relay operates. Instead of a button, I'd need a keypad as you have.
Just not quite as cheap as I'd hoped, and I'll get shot by the wife for wasting money on "more crap" =)
So I have a big Murican style AC system / Heat pump for our 2nd story which cops a lot of direct sun during the summer.
On hot days the sun really impacts the efficiency of the unit, so I installed a water misting system to pre-cool the air flowing through it. This worked really well, so I’ve automated it with a Zigbee valve and it works great. The valve only opens when the AC is actively cooling the house, then it shuts off.
This is the next upgrade to the misting. We had a closed loop water cooling at work at our data center with radiators outside and it really does lower the cost of just air radiators.
