I’ve tried to modify the Home and Away routines to exclude the alarm and lights, but then the feature is completely useless as that’s mainly what I wanted it to control. It’s doing its job and it’s doing its best, but it’s primitive. After a while, the lights all turn out at the most inconvenient times, because Google thinks that no one is home. When we’re home, we don’t keep our phones in our pockets or hands after we settle in most of the time, and we may sometimes walk around the house or do some work on the computer. This occurs because when I return home, my alarm turns off and all of the lights turn on to welcome me, but the same behavior occurring at night is anything but ideal. At the same time, the alarm suddenly turns off, which could be dangerous that late at night if I hadn’t heard it happen. This happens because, after a long night of my phone not moving, Google suddenly thinks I’ve returned home from being away. One of the results of this includes all of the lights in the house turning on when I wake up to use the restroom in the middle of the night, forcing me to quickly turn them off in order to keep my son from waking up. With that, my Nest Guard facing the front door instead of my living room and the door and window sensors covered by blinds, I’m left with my phone to determine if I’m home or away. So, after running up my bills because I don’t know much about HVAC units – something I’m ashamed of – that thermostat is now sitting in my junk drawer. (Way before their new HVAC monitoring feature became a reality). You see, I have a Nest thermostat E which Google said was compatible with my home HVAC system, but upon receiving it, I found out that it was not – a year later. It could be that I haven’t set it up ideally, but from what I could tell, and I’ve poked through all of the settings and tweaked everything as best as I could, I still couldn’t get it to work for me in a way that didn’t end up in complete frustration and me disabling it entirely. When the feature first arrived, I was excited to start using it. Whenever your phone, Nest devices or other compatible sensors in your home sense your presence, they toggle things on or off or change your thermostat temperature if you’re utilizing Home and Away with presence sensing in the Google Home app. Automatically turning all of my lights on or off, automating the Nest Secure and more when I leave or return home sounded like a dream come true, but so far it’s been an absolute nightmare for me and my family in our home and I think I know why. Google Home’s new Home and Away with presence sensing feature released in the beginning of October and promises some pretty awesome tricks for home automation addicts like myself.
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