I’m a Vera2 user with 5 Trane thermostats, three Schlage locks, and a bunch of light switches. My main complaint with my Vera2 is the difficulty in setting it to a “Vacation” mode that will hold the temperature in the house to a set temperature, and ignore the normal daily schedule for the thermostats. MiCasaVerde has come out with a new user interface that has this functionality built in (UI7), but it is universally known to be very buggy. The stable UI5 does not have this functionality unless one installs custom code and other complicated stuff.
Does Smartthings handle vacations easily? If so, can you describe how?
Thanks!
David
tgauchat
(ActionTiles.com co-founder Terry @ActionTiles; GitHub: @cosmicpuppy)
2
SmartThings has 1 documented global (actually, one per Location under an Account) indicator called “Mode” which is meant to implement the functionality you describe. People also use statuses such as “Home, Away, Day, Night” for daily routines.
Nearly all SmartApps (Dashboard Solution and custom SmartApps) check for “location.mode” and skip their execution if not in the specified mode (or some do the reverse). It is not very consistent because this is not a mandatory SmartApp parameter.
(We’ve discussed having more globals, but not mandatory ones; who could I discuss this with (@April))
Recent discussions here are around the concept of Virtual Switches which are near globals (any SmartApp can subscribe to the status of a Virtual Switch), but that still would not ensure their use consistently.
In short: SmartThings is flexible enough to do what you need, but the “out of the box” stock apps may not be consistent in this behavior, yet you can customize.
But I found this reference to a little more info on “Modes” and Hello Home ™ Actions which are the main official macros:
