Pre-heat your home

[Mitch_P]

Hello everyone! I’ve been struggeling quite some time trying to get the ideal flow(s) for pre-heating my home before arriving. I think I have a decent set-up now, but I would very much like everyone’s opinion/experiences.

Here’s how I’ve set up everything.

What to use

• Logic: in this case I just use the built-in logic of Homey
• Virtual switch: this can be added by adding a new device and selecting Homey as brand (before this you have to activate “power user” in the experiments setting in the Homey app)

Flow 1
Homey checks every hour between a certain time period, if the temperature is lower than 21°C, and nobody (not even a guest) is home. If so, it will start the second flow.

WHEN
Every 1 hours

AND
I only want the flow to work between the hours that I might go home, therefore my and is "Time is between 17:00 and 22:00.

2nd and for the temperature with Logic: “Room (-> tag for room temperature) is less than 21”

Also, I don’t want the flow to trigger when I am already home, so my 3nd AND is “Nobody is at home”.

Lastly, I use a virtual switch to know whether or not a guest is home. I’m not going into detail on that right now, but I’ve set it up as my 4th AND.

THEN
Because I would like to receive a push notification asking me if the heating can be turned on, IF the above conditions are met, I need to put that in a seperate flow. Therefore the THEN part of this flow is “Start a flow: Thermostat pre-heat 2”

All of the above looks like this:

Flow 2
As said, I want to receive a push notification asking me if the heating can be turned on.

WHEN
“This flow is started”

AND
Here I set up that push notifcation: "Confirm: The current temperature at home is (tagRoom) °C. Do you want to pre-heat?

THEN
Set the temperature to 21°C. This will only be triggered when I confirm Yes on the push notification.

This flow looks like this:

---

What do you think? Is there a better way to set up a pre-heat scheme? I’d love to hear your feeback!

[Mrtijn]

Honestly I think there is a better way, if I might recommend geofencing certain locations or activities you could do. In my case I have my heating organized so that it starts heating when I get in a certain geofenced area (or homey app detects I’m home, which ever comes first).

It might be better to think out some specific use cases, like when I leave from work, I’d like my heating to go on. When I’m almost at home, I’d like my heating to go on. If this is done, then you could start thinking how you would make these scenario’s happen. IFTTT is a nice way, there are also low cost options with ali express gps trackers which make HTTP requests for in, for example, your car.

Just a suggestion I hate it when I have to interact with my domotics, no speech, no questions, it should regulate

[Mitch_P]

Hi Mrtijn, thanks for your input! I completely agree on the whole “it should regulate as much as possible by itself without user interaction”. Unfortunately I have a very irregular life, so leaving work does not necessarily mean I’m going home. Therefore the best solution I could come up with was the one above :-). The dream would be that as soon as I set my waze (gps) to home, the heating starts by itself, but I don’t see a possibility to automate that yet …

[Mrtijn]

The irregular life is familiar. I have the same issue and I have a wife

In our case we decided to start heating when we are at home. Mostly because we don’t sit down in the first 30 minutes when we are home and it’s most often just a degree difference. Then for pre-heating issues. Are there geofencing spots which you could identify to start preheating your house Certain places on the route when you are traveling?

[Mitch_P]

I also have that set up of course (when I come home, turn on the heating). If you come home every day the difference in temperature is indeed not so big . I’m not so familiar with the whole geo-fencing stuff, but I assume you can identify an area that when you enter it something should happen . Still, identifying all of this and trying to set it up (taking my irregular lifestyle into account) seems like quite a lot of work, opposite to simply receiving a notification once an hour between 5pm and 22pm asking me to turn up the heating or not .

[Mrtijn]

An hourly distraction by homey. The WAF would be soooo low

[Mitch_P]

@Mrtijn & anyone else , I found the PERFECT solution (at least for me) . If you have an android device, start reading at item 2, if you have an iPhone, start at item 1.

1. Apple’s “Shortcuts” app
Download this app if you haven’t already, and create a simple shortcut called “I’m going home” that launches the Google Assistant app and tells Google Assistant “Hey Google, I’m going home”

Note /!\ : to be able to download the Google Assistant app in Belgium, and maybe other EU countries, you need to create a US (or maybe UK) apple ID, then with that you can download the Google Assistant app.

2. Create/modify the routine “Commuting home” in Google Assistant app
Besides other useful actions such as starting apple maps/waze/google maps with you route home, you can let it adjust your thermostat!

Note /!\ : to be able to use routines in Google Assistant (or Google Home) you probably need to put your phone and/or accounts in English, since this feature is not yet supported in Dutch

By the way, I still kept my original scheme as described earlier, but I modified the temperature check so that Homey only asks me to pre-heat when the temperature is below 19 degrees.

[Mrtijn]

Nice solution, but I’d like to keep Google out of it

[moenieseuren]

I work about a twenty minutes drive from home, my “perfect solution” is:

I created a Macrodroid macro that does a few things:

• It sends a HTTP GET request to my Homey, that triggers a flow that turns on the heating.
• It starts Google Maps and starts guiding me home (I know the route, but sometimes it’s useful to avoid traffic jams).
• It starts Flitsmeister (best invention after Homey).

I created a shortcut on my phone’s home screen to start the macro.

[Statham85]

I made an virtual device, that start a flow that turns up the heat if its to cold. So I can just tell Siri to start it by voice, or push button ofc.

Even works when I am at home and want a boost to the temperature. And every user can use it in HomeKit.

[Oakhill]

Macrodroid rules

[victoroos]

I don’t even have the confirm option in notifications:o