I am interested in turning a water heat on when my client is heading toward their vacation house. Since it takes some time to heat teh water I want this to happen when they are about an hour out but the geofence distance stops at 3000m. The thing that comes to mind is to set another one on the highway heading to town so it sees them on the way. Is there a different approach?
To give your client access for geofence … you will have to have them install an app and give them your account info which would give them full access to your Vera.
That seems like it would be pretty dangerous.
Use the iPhone Locater plugin, you will need the users iTunes account info but that should be no real security risk to them.
Your client, their house… who owns the Vera? Them or you? It sounds to me like you’ve sold them a system, and just manage it for them, or that you’re a property manager who looks after the property on their behalf.
Seriously? Giving the username and password to your iCloud account gives access to everything your iPhone syncs, your backups, and the ability to lock out the phone.
If someone asked me for that I’d be very suspicious and no way I’d share it.
Even sharing my location tracking would be weird - I’d rather just have it based on the expected arrival time.
Water heaters usually don’t take much time to come up to temp, like 30-40 minutes for a standard US water heater. I imagine the 3000 mark would be plenty, unless they run from the car to the bathroom and expect a really hot bath.
The other option is to have multiple geofence points along the route and handle the logic to know which direction they’re traveling, but I imagine it wouldn’t be nearly as accurate as you’d like.
I’ve tried the geofence thing, but it’s no where near flexible enough for me. I prefer multiple motion sensors as well as pinging the network to tell who/when someone is home. I’d almost prefer pattern matching to determine who someone is rather than having to install something on each persons device.