I was one of the lucky ones selected to participate in the early trial of the W200.
I want to start off by saying I’m really impressed with the W200, and it has replaced the Ecobee Premium that I had been using since Google bricked the older Nest thermostats.
One of the most notable features for Apple users is that you can choose from two scheduling modes: Apple Home and Aqara. In the settings in the Aqara app:
Aqara mode is your standard smart home 7-day schedule to set your daily routines using built-in and custom presets. It is fully featured and works great with the exception of some functionality that should be available by release or shortly afterwards.
Apple mode hands the scheduling over to Apple Home functionality. Apple calls it “Adaptive Temperature”, and it flips things around by being built to focus primarily on home presence instead of a 7-day schedule. This might be exactly what you were looking for if you don’t have a relatively fixed 7-day schedule. Video overview of the Apple Home UI:
It basically lets you set heat/cool settings based on the four combinations of home/away + day/night. Home/away is based on your family’s detected phone or watch locations like in other Apple Home features where “home” means any one or more people at home. Day/night is what you specify as the start/end times of what “night” means to you.
In Apple mode, you can optionally enable settings to reduce energy usage during peak pricing (currently only available from Apple to PG&E customers along the US West Coast) or during times when clean energy generation is not available (currently USA and Canada only). Interesting concepts, especially if you have dynamic pricing. During peak pricing or less clean energy, it will automatically set the temperatures slightly higher (AC) or lower (heat) to reduce usage. In my experience, it has been a 1°F adjustment up or down.
I spent weeks using Apple scheduling mode, and it works well so long as you don’t want different set points at different times of day while you’re at home.
Both modes have their strengths and weaknesses depending on the individual’s needs. I’ve personally decided to go with Aqara’s scheduling mode only because my schedule is pretty well defined and my peak pricing is easy to implement as a set of predefined hours Mon-Fri.
The Aqara app has geofencing options in automations for home arrival, etc, or you can use Apple Home automations to trigger some settings in the Aqara app via a feature called “Scene Sync”.
Scene Sync allows you to pass certain Aqara app actions on to another Matter platform as switches to be triggered there. So, you could create an Apple Home automation to do something like, “when the first person arrives home, turn on this switch” - which in turn sets the W200 to the “Home” preset.
This is ultimately what I have settled on for now: a standard 7-day schedule that uses automations in Apple Home to change the preset to “Away” if/when we leave for parts of the day, and changes back to “Home” when we return.
If I had dynamic peak pricing or a very dynamic schedule, I probably would have picked the Apple mode.
