Home Monitoring - guest status

Hi all, new to this so please be gentle: set my home monitoring up and working. Great. However I would like to be able to set up a mode where certain sensors are off when we have guests (eg certain connection and motion sensors). However the SmartThings app only seems to have home / away / disarmed.

I assume there is away of setting up custom modes without having to manually adjust each sensor every time we have guests?

Any advice on this welcomed!! Using v3 SmartThings hub, SmartThings multisensors and Samsung motion sensors.

Yes you can add modes, in the classic app, but Modes are not tied to sensors… only automations/smartapps. IE a contact sensor will always report the state change (open/close) regardless of mode, but if you have an automation or smartapp that notices you when the front door has been open for longer than 5 mins… that can be disabled w/ modes.

Smartthings has two different kinds of modes.

Location.modes are for things like daytime and night time and you can add more of those. They can be used to control when automations run.

However, security.modes are for the SmartThings home monitor ( in the new V3 app) Or smart home monitor (in the classic V2 app). Those control the security features and you cannot add any more of those, you are just stuck with the three that they give you.

It’s easy to get confused about these because they both have a value of “home“ and “away“ but they are used in quite different ways.

The following thread has examples of how each type of mode is used and usually helps clear up the confusion between them.

FAQ: Armed/Disarmed states vs Away/Home modes confusion (Classic app)

So the answer is, it depends on which type of modes you are talking about. If it’s the ones associated with SmartThings home monitor, that’s the security.mode, and you can’t add additional ones.

Ah, I’m using the new app rather than classic. Think it’s too late to switch.

Looks like the home/away/disarm is it then. Is there a way to write a custom setting such as ‘turn off lights’, ‘turn off tv’, arm shm.

Thought this would be in scenes but that seems to only be for lights tv etc, can’t seem to control shm.

Nothing controls the new apps SHM yet, youre not missing anything.

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