I live in an area where it frequently gets up to 80+ degrees during the day but below 50 in the evening. I have my sleeping temperature set to 60-66 for ideal sleeping. Oftentimes, the house may not be quite cooled to that temperature but it’s too cold outside to run the AC without damaging it. The thermostat needs a way to automatically not run AC even if the house isn’t at the desired temperature if it’s too cold outside.
Now, I can create an automation to turn heating mode on or turn the thermostat off when it drops below 55. However, when it rises back above 55, there’s no way to resume the smart schedule I set. I can only set a specific scene, but if it’s the wrong time of day when the temperature rises, then I’m stuck in the wrong scene (e.g. I set it to the Sleep scene assuming it will get above 55 while I’m still sleeping, but if it actually doesn’t warm up until after I’m awake then it’s set in the Sleep scene instead of the regular Home scene).
There are a couple potential solutions here.
- Add the ability for an automation to resume a smart schedule, or preferably
- Add a setting for the thermostat itself to not run AC when it gets below a certain temperature outside.
Obviously I can open windows or manually change my thermostat setting if I know it will be cold out, but that defeats the point of a smart thermostat that can run on a smart schedule and other thermostats (including dumb thermostats) have this ability natively.
Ive noticed that too. You can have an automation to “then” set it as a mode, but not resume what it was before.
So away mode is really wonky because you can have it set to home when your phone is back in range of your home, for example, but that’s a temp hold in home mode. When it should just resume the home mode as it was before (not a temp hold it does now). Its just a wonky implementation.
I also noticed setting it as away via automation when I leave, that if another set schedule time passes, it goes into that mode in the schedule, and doesnt respect the away mode. Maybe that’s vacation? Some of the stuff seems a bit lost in translation (like why there is both an away and vacation mode).
Funny how quickly the “grumpy old man shouting at the cloud” argument falls apart when the laws of thermodynamics check in. Welcome to the club, @jk1211.
What you are discovering is why outdoor temperature sensors are a fundamental requirement, not a luxury.
Without an outdoor sensor, any “predictive” algorithm is just driving a car by looking only at the rearview mirror. It has no idea why the room is suddenly cooling down faster, it only reacts after it has already happened. And worse, it is completely blind to the fact that it’s freezing the compressor outside.
A real thermostat uses outdoor ambient temperature to proactively gate the cooling loop and calculate thermal load. Expecting a device to do this using only indoor temperature and brittle time-of-day scenes is exactly the kind of counter-intuitive engineering you get when a company treats a climate controller like a smart lightbulb.