@smartthings I would like to make a feature request on the smartthings platform, i do know there are ways around what i am about to ask but there are a lot of issues with these work arounds.
I have quite a few automations that need to be on or trigger only when it is the right season.
For example, i don’t want my AC turning on during the winter times and i don’t want my heating turning on or my hot water turning on during the summer months. Despite being able to do this with temperature sensors, a simple issue with the temperature sensor (e.g offline) can trigger the automations with the result of wasting energy and money for nothing. Also during the spring months it is not hot enough to have the AC on all night, but in the summer months, the AC is very overpowered by the really hot temperatures here, this means i need to have different automations based on the season, and turn off the automations that don’t apply at the time. As the whole point is for things to be done automatically, this defeats the purpose a bit.
This is just my case and does not apply solely to heating and cooling, but also to the light we get during each month, the temperature of our fridge and more.
What i would like to request is to have months added as triggers inside the smartthings API so that we could select the months that we want as an additional trigger when creating automations.
The rest of the community, what do you guys think?
Just as we have Location and Security modes, I’d like there to be calendar based modes that are updated every day. So I’d like to be able to define school days, leave days and vacations but ‘seasons’ would work too. It just seems like something that should be defined on a Location basis.
So same end result handled differently and probably much less likely to happen.
A ‘month’ based Automation condition certainly doesn’t seem like a big jump from what we have. We’ve got the day of the week, so why not month of the year?
I use scenes to change the modes at my home but it is for a day. if same can be achieved for the season that will be great. e.g. Sept-Dec becomes fall. This scene is executed at a higher level based on calendar(months) and it shouldn’t change the daily scenes.
While I like the idea… for myself, I would prefer a range of days and not by month or seasons. I do have one webcore piston that runs between April 15 through October 25 of each year that I would love to duplicate in an automation. While months would work, seasons are too broad for most use cases for myself, especially in regards to use with outside temps. I am not against either… added features are always good. Just throwing my request for any type of range whether that is by seasons, months, range of dates or combination of all three.
I would also love to have more complex automations… i.e. if A/C is running, turn ceiling fans to lower speed but base the speeds on the indoor temp.
At first when I saw the Calendar feature in Companion Apps, I was thinking this Calendar integration was going to allow me to setup calendar events that could be the trigger for Automations in SmartThings. But all the Calendar feature does is extend calendar event notifications to a TV screen or Speaker. It would have been nice if the Calendar integration would have allowed me to select (or create) a calendar event as the Automation trigger that would then do whatever I wanted in SmartThings.
So as for the Smart Thermostat, I’m restricted to using my Thermostat in Auto Mode set to 74 degrees (which by the way the SmartThings device handler cannot adjust). Then with the Thermostat advanced feature manually set to a 10 degree offset range, that sets the Heating at 69 degrees and Cooling at 79 degrees for Auto mode. So all I do is put the thermostat in Auto mode when I’m home, and Off mode when I’m away or when a multipurpose sensor is open.
I had a quick look through old posts and smartapps but found nothing to help apart from WC, until you guys mentioned the lack of day, week, month I never really noticed
Would be a useful option, especially if it was tied to a calender entry or range
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