Pausing routines while on vacation

Hey guys, just installed my ST v2 over the weekend & am very new to this, so pardon my ignorance.

Right now the only device I have paired is a CT100 thermostat. I currently have 2 routines: one to adjust temperatures while we are at work & then one to adjust the temperature for when we are back home.

Is there an easy way to pause these daily routines while away for vacation?

Yes, create a routine called “vacation”…Depending on how the other two routines trigger, you can adjust this new routine to cancel the other two…

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The other two are triggered by time of day.

There are three Modes by default - Home/Night/Away

You can add more modes. If you had a mode, say Vacation, then you can put your house into “Vacation” mode. Assuming you’ve set up all your automations to only run in specific modes, and you don’t check Vacation as one of the modes, then all your non-vacation automations will simply not do anything when you put your house into Vacation mode.

See https://support.smartthings.com/hc/en-us/articles/200962880-How-do-Modes-work-

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So you would have those routines ONLY trigger if mode is NOT vacation. And then everything will work as you want.

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Then you need to use modes…When the “work” routine triggers, change the mode to “work”. When the “home” routine triggers change to home. Use the “vacation” for both a manual routine and a mode. When you go in vacation, just run the routine and as long as you are in the “vacation” mode, the other two will not fire at their set times…

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I appreciate the help fellas!

I totally agree that a unique mode is the right answer for this problem, but it’s so much more too! Before I get into that though, have a great vacation :smile: The nice side benefit of using a custom vacation mode is that it will give users some options beyond just solving this one single immediate problem.

While I understand that you’re just using the thermostat for the moment, that might not always be the case. What if you’re using motion sensors while you are at work and having them send you a text? Great if you’re not traveling abroad, but a tweet or email pairing with IFTTT might be a better temporary solution. If you live in a rough area like me, maybe you want lights and possibly even TVs burning a bit of electricity while you’re gone in order to convince others that perhaps there are other places easier to rob. Perhaps you use a SmartApp to determine if the mail is here…well, probably no point in doing that if you’re going to be back next week.

Modes are incredibly powerful and VERY easy to integrate into nearly everything you connect to a SmartHub. It’s difficult to overstate that usefulness of modes.

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I have a couple similar modes with my system. One is “away for weekend.” I use this one primarily to keep my Nests from returning to home mode. My wife normally gets home at the same time every day so I’ve got a smartapp that sets the nests back to home about an hour beforehand to get the house warmed or cooled to normal before she arrives, unless the mode is away for weekend. This is also used for vacations, etc.

Second is “guest” mode. We use our phones as presence sensors and trigger away mode when we leave, which kills the majority of the lights and the living room TV. We often have the grandparents/family over to watch the kiddos and shortly after my wife and I leave (shopping, etc) we get a call that the house went dark and the TV is off. Now we’re on the phone trying to explain to guests how to get the TV back on. LOL. So, we just set a guest mode that prevents the presence sensors from trigger the away mode. It will stay in this mode until you manually trigger home or away mode.

I have 8 modes. They are the core of my ST installation

Home - Day: Sunrise activated and when things start happening
Home - Night: Sunset activated
Home - Sleep: when things quiet down
Away - Day: Everyone gone during day
Away - Night: Everyone gone during night
Vacation: Yay! Sets house to looking like occupied.
Maintenance: Fixing stuff, nothing runs
Party: Planned, not done yet. Will shutoff things like sprinklers, make house more comfortable, etc.

Smart Home Alarm set appropriately for all modes now too.

Modes are what makes ST unique. They make home automation possible when more than one person lives in the house. In my case, with five of us, customizing the routines without modes would be quite impossible. I used to have 12 modes in my v1 set up and they all worked well. In v2 I trimmed down the number because some of the alarm type of modes are now part of the Smart Monitor. The eight I kept are:

Daytime: switches automatically at sunrise and turns off the alarm
Quiet time: switches automatically when kids go to bed (for nap or at night)
Evening: switches automatically at sunset
Night: switches automatically when we go to bed
Night Action: if the sensors are triggered over night
Away: switches automatically when everyone leaves before sunset
Away at Night: switches automatically when everyone leaves after sunset
Vacation: yes, this one is also automated when no one is at home for extended period of time.

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I can’t figure out how to switch to vacation if nobody is home for a certain period of time, help me out?