So I have a quite solid setup in Homey now which works great for me being a single household. This is what I have set up:
- Timed flows that acts on sunrise & sunset to set different light scenes independent of anything else
- Timed flows that acts on specific time during day to set different light scenes independent of anything else
- Presence flows that triggers when I come home or leave home
… - Timed flows that acts on specific time during day and depends on if I am at home or not
- Surveillance flows based on Heimdahl that is dependent on if anyone is at home or not
With regards to the last 2 flows mentioned you can see that these are dependent on if I am at home or not. For example, Homey detects if I have been away for longer than 5 minutes, then surveillance will enable and also a scene to turn of most indoor lights & media will trigger.
Now what I want to have is like a guest mode that overrides most of the above. This is important if for example a carpenter is at home to fix something during the day when I am away elsewhere, or if my mom stays over while I’m away. I don’t want something like:
- All lights are set nicely but then all of a sudden at 7 pm Homey sees I am not at home so all lights and all media turns off. Mom would be frustrated in the middle of her favorite TV show
Since I cannot give a Homey account to all carpenters or others that stay here temporary I was thinking about creating a guest mode flow. When a specific state is enabled then Homey thinks the house is currently having guests in it so I can act on that. When the guest leaves they can click a button by the door to disable the guest mode.
I was hoping I could simply create a new Guest in Homey but that requires a unique user per guest account that also installs Homey to function as intended.
How have all of you others done it? Do you think it is a good idea to make a virtual switch for “Is guest mode” and then act on that?