I had a thought today, wanted to try it out.
I have an issue with my Nest, the Nest is in a location where there is not a lot of activity during the day, so when I enable Auto-Away, the unit turns off during the day when it shouldn’t.
My test goes like this:
I enabled my Auto-Away on the Nest…
I have the Official Nest Plugin (Even though I fell the previous Non-Official Nest App was better)
I configured the Motion Sensors, Garage Door and Front Door to set the Nest to Home anytime a motion is detected when I am in Home status
I don’t know the back end piece of how the Nest configures itselt to Auto-Away, I’m assuming that the device has some sort of a timeout clock where if no motion is detected, it sets itself as Auto-Away.
My theory is that when I send a new Home command to the Nest, it resets the timeout clock, so as long as one of the sensors detects something, it will keep the nest from going into Auto-Away.
Might take me a few days to figure out if this works, when I re-enabled the Auto-Away, I noticed that the Auto-Scheduled status changed to “Learning” again.
I don’t have anything to offer on this… other than it’s issues like this that steer me away from using a Nest. I can see its use in a small apartment, something other than a “smart home,” or for someone that doesn’t intend to go much further with HA. Otherwise, let thermostats control temperature, motion sensors detect motion, and the controller/brain/gateway tie it all together.
Timeout for Auto-Away seems to be 30 minutes.
I ran a test by only enabling one of my Motion Sensors to send the Home Status to the Nest, this is one located in a different room, because I am trying to test how it would work if there is no motion.
The Nest went into Auto-Away after 30 minutes.
As soon as I walked into the other room, the Nest changed back to Home.
So now I have to see if sending the Home status to the Nest will reset the Timeout, so in theory the Auto-Away should not be enabled unless none of the motion sensors pick up any motion for 30 minutes.
But I also just realized that if there is a time where I want to make sure the Nest does not go into Auto-Away, I can do that by scheduling a scene that sends a Home status every 15 minutes, then the rest of the time allowing the Auto-Away to continue to run.
I added a scene that runs in 15 minute intervals that sets the Nest to Home, that only runs when the Vera is set to Night.
This is to prevent the Auto Away from running when the Vera is set to Night more, for things like taking naps and things like that. Auto Away seems to be something that only runs during the daytime, so when taking naps, the AC used to go into auto away.
Ok, so far it looks like my theory is right, every time you set the Nest to Home, it continues to postpone the Nest from going Auto-Away.
It looks like the Time Out is every 30 minutes, so as long as something sends a new Home to the Nest Plugin, the Auto Away gets delayed another 30 minutes.
So my setup now is that all Motion sensors send a Home to Nest every time they detect motion.
My front door sends a Home to Nest when the door is unlocked.
My garage sends a Home to Nest when the door is opened.
And on top of that, I have set up a Scene where every 15 minutes, a Home is sent to the Nest when in Night mode, to keep the Nest from going into Auto Away.
Been running it like this for over 24 hours, and its perfect.
I enabled alerts when the Nest went to Home/Away/Auto-Away, so as I came in and out of the house, I knew how my Nest was working.
Every time I have left my house, within 30-40 minutes I received an Alert that my Nest was in Auto-Away, as soon as I opened my garage door or front door I got an Alert that my Nest was now set to Home.
I almost bought a Nest Protect just for this purpose, I already have ZWave Smoke Detectors, so I really didn’t want to spend the $99 for it, I’m also not a big fan of adding sensors to my house that call home to Google, I already have a Nest and thats one too many Google sensors in my house.
But because the API is sending my motion sensors details to Google, now knows when I’m home and when I’m not. Creepy!!!
I’ve disabled the nest Auto-Away feature and just use Vera to control the away status.
I have a Kwikset Zwave lock on my front door.
I have a trigger configured so that if anyone presses the lock button from the outside, it puts Vera and Nest into away mode using the WWN Nest plugin.
Whenever anyone enters a PIN to unlock the front door, it puts Vera and Nest into Home mode.
Works great for me.
None of us use a key to lock or unlock the door anymore and I’ve trained my family to not push the lock button if anyone else is still at home since it also turns out all the lights and the TV.
If you don’t have a Z-wave lock, you should be able to use your motion sensors.
Disable auto-away and use the motion sensors to set Home status and possibly after no motion for x minutes, set to away status.
If you’re on UI7, You can use the HouseModes plugin to trigger a scene to set the Nest mode based on the house mode.