Hello! How can I configure my Nest Thermostat to ‘hold’ a temperature? I quite often will be heading home (sometimes a long drive) and want to preheat (or precool) the house. I have buttons in Home Assistant that run automations which will set me home or away (I also use geo-fencing, but I want to be able to manually override in this scenario).
So the Nest will be forced out of eco/away mode and set to a particular temperature - but quite often the Nest will then later detect that indeed no one is home and go back to the ‘away’ mode and the house will not pre-heat! I know there are ways in the Google Home app to set a ‘hold’ on the temperature for a period of time (or even indefinitely) - but I can’t seem to figure out how to set the hold temperature on the Nest Thermostat from Home Assistant. Is this possible?
You need to turn off the presence detection and Leaf modes in your Nest account, then whatever you tell it to set to will stay set. You would want to anyway on any smart thermostat since you have a smarter home assistant.
Another thing to know is that the ‘learn’ option of the Nest thermostats may set a temperature at specific times based on what it thinks is your habit and that may change the temperature that you have HA to set.
You need to turn off the presence detection and Leaf modes in your Nest account, then whatever you tell it to set to will stay set. You would want to anyway on any smart thermostat since you have a smarter home assistant.
Hm, I did not think about this thanks for making that point. I want presence detection however, especially when we are not home but others may be (presence detection based on motion instead a phone). This way I don’t need to override it and know exactly when folks are in the house and when they are not (we have a lot of friends and family that come and stay at the house, sometimes when we are not there ourselves).
It’s not pretty but I may just create an override toggle switch so if the toggle is enabled and the temperature changes it will re-evaluate if the temperature is sufficient or not. If not, turn back on the Nest and set the temperature to the desired level. Make my own ‘hold’ feature if you will - I just figured there was a hold option in the Google Home app for the Nest, why isn’t that exposed in the API - perhaps this is the reason, most folks disable the presence sensing entirely when using Home Assistant, which makes sense.
Another thing to know is that the ‘learn’ option of the Nest thermostats may set a temperature at specific times based on what it thinks is your habit and that may change the temperature that you have HA to set.
Good point, we have the cheapo Nests that are not able to ‘learn’ - although at a previous house I did have a Nest that was capable of this, and definitely turned it off! My schedule is just too unpredictable for any learning feature to help with.