Where is the “right place” in the latest generation of HA to implement some Home/Away routines?
I don’t want to use proximity at the present time. I get the merits of it, it’s just not how I want to approach this setup.
It’s a vacation home and I’d like to implement some routines for handling setbacks on thermostats, water valve shutoffs and other ‘away’ kind of modes for devices. And, likewise a ‘home’ mode.
A point to consider is winter/summer variations. As in, if it’s cold I’m not worried about the air conditioner in a small outbuilding, but would want the baseboard heater to keep things from freezing, and vice-versa monitoring humidity on hot days to avoid moisture problems.
And I’m wondering how HA handles re-checking a state like this in the event of a reboot from power loss.
I don’t trust home-away for a vacation home to automation.
I have a home away button on the main dashboard.
UPDATE…
(I also have a full house standby generator with a couple of UPS’s on computers and stuff to cover the 20 seconds before the gen set kicks in.)
First step is to put the HA box, router / internet modem on a UPS. Connect the UPS vis NUT to HA.
You’ve now protected HA from getting corrupted on a power failure and you can send yourself a message (I like telegram) when the house loses and regains power. No power = no heat.
Second step, is to determine if the internet modem always recovers after an ISP internet outage. For example my spectrum modem does not, so HA is setup to automatically power cycle the modem if the internet has been unavailable for 60 minutes.
Third step is to determine how you will know if HA is not working (e.g. computer crashes).
At this point you have a reasonably reliable HA system, that can report helpful events to you (power failure, heat failure, water leaks, …)
I use an input_boolean to put the house into away mode. Away mode sets back thermostats, turns off the water heater, disables light automations, turns off some smart plugs. Like @Sir_Goodenough says putting house into away mode is a deliberate action.
I have a separate mode “no occupancy” that does heat setbacks. That more intended for the house being unoccupied for a couple of hours up to a day or so and just does thermostat setbacks and enabling the alarm system.