My thermostat has a nice away mode feature but I’m not going to remember to enable that every time we leave the house and we would forget to disable it when we come home (until the temperature was far enough off in the house). So I decided it was time to let my house track whether I was home or not.

I had read through forum and blog posts about different ways to let Home Assistant know your location and there are a lot of options out there. I tried the native Home Assistant IOS app for a while but it had a noticeable impact on my battery life. Since I already had a secured MQTT broker running in the house so I opened that up to the internet, and gave OwnTracks a try. I found that if i kept OwnTracks in ‘significant move’ mode, the updates were good enough and it didn’t have a big impact on my battery life. I did however find that I needed a geofence around my house to guarantee a timely update when coming and going. Sometimes the significant move update happened a couple of feet outside of my ‘Home’ zone and HA never knew I made it back. I now have geofences defined in OwnTracks that are just slightly smaller than each zone I have defined in Home Assistant.

Like others out there that use the phone’s GPS for location, I found that occasionally while my phone was sitting on the coffee table, it believed it had moved down the street and so it updated its location. Within a minute or two it would send another update letting the Home Assistant know it was back. Since I didn’t want automations kicking off randomly while we watched TV I went looking for how other people solved this. I found Phil Hawthorne’s blog post about making presence not so binary and I thought it was a great solution. I created the states and automations he described and tested it out. I still got the occasional notice that I ‘Just Left’ but never a false ‘Away’ state. So with the house reliably knowing when I was home I added OwnTracks to my wife’s phone and setup a couple of automations. Now when we are both ‘Away’, Home Assistant puts the thermostat in away mode and it sets it back to normal mode when either one of us goes from ‘Away’ to ‘Just Arrived’.

I think I finally have a glimmer of ‘smart’ in my smart home. It does still rely on us remembering to take our phones when we leave but that is a different issue. With the house knowing if we are home I have new ideas of what I could automate if only I had some spare time.

Jacob