Controlling the water heating when we home

Am I over thinking this.
I want to only heat our Hot water if we are at home.
When going to make the routine using
Member Location - the states are
Someone arrives or someone leaves.
What about if we don’t leave or arrive…
Ie Monday we arrive home from work at 1800hrs and I want the hot water to come on at 1900hrs.
Would it see us as present rather than arriving?
Or is there another way I can get it to see if someone is home before starting the routine of heating the water.
Does this make sense?

Use the location mode:

1 Like

I have a virtual home presence sensor that I use as both a precondition in ST Routines and as a trigger for Alexa routines. If any person in my home is present, the virtual sensor is set to Present. When all people leave, it gets set to Not Present.

2 Likes

I use the Home Monitor for this - it basically acts as a virtual switch.

1 Like

Think this would work, thank you.

1 Like

Yeah hadn’t thought of this. Thank you.

1 Like

Yes. From the day ‘Member Location’ first appeared, the community has been begging ST to at least allow us to see the current states of the mobile presence sensors given their somewhat mixed reliability, and preferably to stop hiding them from the app so we can work with them directly (fortunately they are available outside the apps).

It wouldn’t be quite so bad if there was even such a thing as an individual ‘member location’. If we could define how we wish our available mobile presence devices (and ideally other sources) to be combined to determine if we were ‘home’ or ‘away’ on an individual basis then that would be great. We could then have a sensible ‘Member Location’ condition. But no, instead all the logic is handled in the Routines based on combinations of presence sensors.

The use of ‘arrives’ and ‘leaves’ is perhaps understandable but it is hopelessly misleading. For example, the condition ‘Every time anyone arrives’ can actually be triggered when someone leaves. It really means ‘At least one of the selected devices is present’. If it is being used as a precondition, or combined with other conditions, it may have been hours or days since someone actually arrived or left.

3 Likes

Thank you, does seems like a simple thing to be added, wonder why they havent!