I’m trying to figure out how to allow guests to be in our house when neither my wife nor I are there. Please help me, save me from my mother-in-law.
Current problem: my wife and I’s phones are used as presence sensors, which trigger a Goodbye routine when we leave and an I’m Back routine when we get home (well, that last bit only works 30% of the time, thanks SmartThings. Different issue, though). Most of the time, this setup works fine. The issue is that when we have people in the house but we’re both gone, we don’t want our “Goodbye” routine to run. Her mom comes over to watch the kids while my wife runs an errand and I’m at work, for example, or the time of the week when our cleaning service comes by and we’re all out of the house.
In those situations, we would like the house to act like we’re there in most regards (lights still trigger with motion, etc), and at the very least definitely NOT act like we aren’t there – e.g., don’t arm the alarm, and most definitely don’t shut off all the lights when my mother-in-law is there (I’ll never hear the end of that…“Everything just went dark!”)
One way I thought of accomplishing this was to have a Guest mode, and then have a Routine that puts the house in Guest mode and setup a rule that prevents Routine Director from triggering the Goodbye routine if the house is in Guest mode. But I don’t see any way to do that – neither Routine Director nor the built-in routine functionality seems to have this capability.
How do other people handle this use case?