Please help. I have 4 ceiling fans in the house. I’m trying to figure out how to turn them all on when my Honeywell thermostat reaches a certain temperature. I’ve looked at Virtual Device switches, IFTTT, etc. It seems there are many ways to do this, but I’m still not quite understand what the steps should be. I’ve installed a Virtual Device manager, and also set up Smart Lighting (I have the Hampton Bay controllers, which show up as light switches), but don’t know how to get the Honeywell to activate these. in IFTTT, I can only pull up the Honeywell Lyric as a service (I have the RTH9580 Wi-Fi). Please tell me what I’m missing. Thanks!
[EDIT] Finally figured out how to use Thermostat as a trigger. Now I need to figure out how to put all my ceiling fans as a virtual device switch.
Actually, I finally figured it out. I’m kinda scared to start delving into Webcore, lol. I spend (waste) enough time on the regular stuff…don’t know if I’m ready to learn yet another infrastructure yet.
RBoy
(www.rboyapps.com - Making SmartThings Easy!)
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As @jkp mentioned, WebCoRE is very powerful but I get that many folks are intimidated by the awesome world.
We often recommend folks to use CoRE for simple automations, it’s learning curve us much shorter and has the feel of a regular SmartApp.
Alternatively, if you have access to RBoy Apps check out this app which allows you to use fan/thermostats and other devices to “control” your temperature. Basically you can set a temperature threshold to trigger turning on a fan or other cooling appliance (and vice versa).
And it can be so hard to get people to understand this. My family love to think running a fan on Apache mode will cool the room. Needless to say, I have fixed all that with ST/webCoRE, .
The virtual switch essentially groups all of your fans, so that one switch controls all. If that is the case, and you want to control all of the fans as a group, you can make do with one piston that controls the virtual switch. I’m not sure you gain anything over addressing all the fans in the piston as you posted, but either should work.
Well, I’m basically just playing with creating Pistons for now. There’s a lot of options to mess with. Right now, I’m trying to program some lights to turn off in the morning, but I’m getting this message:
“This piston does not subscribe to any events. Unless executed by other means, it will never run on its own.”
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