I currently have a Nest thermostat in my home. I also have two baseboard heaters on the side of the house furthest from my furnace as those two rooms are almost always 5-10 degrees colder than the rest of the house in the winter. I have both baseboard heaters hooked up to SmartThings and am using a Virtual Thermostat app and an Aeon Multisensor to monitor and control the temperature in those rooms. I currently have my Nest set up to have the temperature turned way down whenever nobody is home (don’t use the away setting, just manually adjust the temp down). I also have a few schedules set so my Nest will regularly start its “pre-heating” mode to adjust the temp. What I’d like to do is figure out a way so my Virtual Thermostat can be connected to the Nest temperature. That way, when the Nest starts “pre-heating”, the baseboard heaters will turn on as well. Is something like this possible? Essentially if my Nest is set at 68 degrees than the virtual thermostat would be at 68 degrees. When the Nest temp is lowered to 50 because I’m away then the virtual thermostat would be set to 50 degrees as well.
If you were using Home/Away modes instead of manually setting the temp you could create an IFTTT recipe that detects when the Nest goes to Home mode and have it turn on the switch for your baseboard heaters.
the problem with using home/away modes is it cancels out any schedules I have set. My house gets pretty cold during the day and I use the pre-heating function to make sure it’s up to temperature by the time I get home from work.
Why not use modes in ST for that instead?
I definitely think this is feasible and a good idea.
Not sure off the top of my head whether this should just be done in the Virtual Thermostat SmartApp, or whether you should / can use a Virtual Device instead or together.
SmartThings doesn’t have many ways to share information between SmartApps because there are very few global variables ("location.mode" is one, but it is rather “busy” already). So another one way is share info is to use attributes in real or virtual Device instances.
Easy to do a mock-up / proof-of-concept.