SmartThings Helping Living with Roommates (Tips Provided)

I live with 5 roommates and SmartThings has been really helpful! Some of my favorite uses are:

Configuring a Goodbye Routine to turn off appliances and light when we all leave.

Having a motion sensor in the bathroom I share with a roommate. I have it set to turn my light blue in my room
when no motion is sensed for a couple minutes from 8-8:20. Letting me know the bathroom is free.

Standard uses like voice control with lights and camera to protect the house when we are gone.

Any other tips for using SmartThings with roommates to help make life a bit easier?

Do all six of you access one hub with the ST mobile app on your phones? Seems like things could get overwhelming with that many people adding or removing things, creating routines, editing smartapps, etc.

Laundry monitor. I assume with that many people in one house, you guys have a laundry room.

I remember being in a similar situation, and the hardest thing (other than sharing the kitchen) was sharing laundry and getting the timing just right on Saturday mornings before everyone else while still being able to sleep in.

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That’s a great suggestion! @MEarly

Yeah we have only one hub. We do a pretty solid job labeling our lighting rules but there a decent amount of smartapps to sort through.

Hey guys, can I ask how do you manage presence with your roommates? Mobile presense only works if I make them download the app, right?
But then once they have the app they have the opportunity to tinker, which I dont want - do I understand that right?

I know there is always smarttiles, which lets me construct a dashboard for them. But that way I would not be able to use their phones as presense device, correct?

Any suggestions for that?

You can set this up and they can install Life360 to track presence instead of them installing the SmartThings app.

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There are several different ways of indicating presence. See the FAQ (this is a clickable link)

At our house we are three roommates and then we all have friends and family who come and go, as well as some health aides. So we use multiple features for presence.

We decided not to use life 360 because it lets you track the other person’s movements during the day and we found that would probably work for family, but didn’t work for us as housemates. It just felt too intrusive.

The SmartThings key fob (or in our case, an I Beacon) works well for us for people who don’t have a smart phone or where we don’t want to give them any out of the house Control capabilities at all.

Another option is to use IFTTT presence. That one doesn’t have the tracking issue, and if you don’t give them your IFTTT password, they can’t make any changes to the account. So again that will work for some households but not for others.

These are all discussed in the FAQ linked to above. :sunglasses:

Webcore also has its own presence option, but I don’t know how that one works. @ady624 or @anon36505037 might have more to add on that one.

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Thanks Tyler for the suggestion and JD (as always) for the very helpful link. Life360 indeed seems like an option that is out of the picture for privacy reasons in our setup, but I will have a closer look at the FAQs you linked up there.

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It seems to be free in the swiss android app store…I would eventually have the same “security” issues than with the normal ST app, right? If I made my roommates download the webcore app, they could potentially edit or accidentally delete the pistons, right?

It’s $2.99 in the US App Store too. Totally worth it, but I’m still glad I downloaded it before payment was required :grin:.

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@ady624 and the @webCoRE_Minions do such a great job I’m thinking about uninstalling the free app and reinstalling the paid version just to throw a little money their way.

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