Home / Away assist

[Mike9112]

Currently I have a Hub Max display and a Nest learning thermostat 3rd gen.  My wife and I have seperate accounts but linked to the home.

But we cannot get the home / away system to use both phones at the same time.  We work different patterns are are home at different times,  My wife works from home sometimes, I do not.  The problem comes about when we are both out of the house.  The home / away goes into away mode sometimes, other times it doesn't.  If I set the presence sensing option to my phone and my wife is at home, the systems goes into away mode until over-ridden.  It appears that we cannot have the system detect if one of us is home when the other is away.  This is now affecting our new learning thermostat as it wont pick up if there is no-one home and adjust the temperature to eco mode which is what we want it to do.  

If I manually set the thermostat to eco mode it doesn't revert to heating when one of us gets home.  This is regardless of what settings I use on either the Nest app from disabling the presence sensing to using it.

Essentially how do I get home / away working on both phones at the same time so my camera activates when neither of us are home and the thermostat goes into eco mode when neither of us are home.  Then swapping when one of use comes home?

[nickfromgoogle]

Hey @Mike9112 - Sorry to hear about your issues using Home / Away with your devices. You should be able to use both of your phones to contribute to home / away status as long as you're both members of the same home and you're each signed in with your own account (which sounds like you've already done this).

We have some troubleshooting steps in our help center ; I recommend checking out the Check Home & Away activity in history section of that article to see if the app is registering each of your phones coming / leaving home. If you notice those events are inaccurate or not being logged, I'd start by checking your phone and app settings; some phones may have aggressive background throttling that prevents location reporting. These are typically things like battery saving modes, performance / optimization modes, or sleeping apps in the background. Hope this helps!

[Mike9112]

Morning @nickfromgoogle, I tried the troubleshooting steps.  My phone works as it should.  Even shows in the activity as leaving and arriving home.  If I change a setting, my wife's phone does exactly the same.  The problem is that we can only have one phone or the other doing this.

When I check the settings on my wife's phone for the Presence Sensing, it is set to allow the home to use phone location.  The problem appears to be in the next section where it states 'You're using this feature on a different phone.  You can switch to this phone' (my phone).  The current location below this is the greyed out.

We are members of the same home with different accounts, we do no have each others account on our  phones.

[nickfromgoogle]

Thanks for the details @Mike9112. Based on your description, it sounds like both phones are signed in to the Google Home app with the same account. Typically, the switch to this phone message pops up if you've enabled presence sensing on a different phone while signed in with your account.

Do you see your phone listed under the "Phone location" in presence sensing settings and your wife's phone listed under "Other phones"? You should see both members and their location opt-in status listed in that settings screen if you've set up presence sensing on each phone to contribute.

[Mike9112]

Well for an update.  I now have my wifes phone being recognised.  It turned out that because she had an old phone that was retired without being signed out of Google, we believe that the home was getting confused.   Due to the fact that you can only have one account on one phone at a time per person in the home.

Both phones have always been signed into the home correctly, it was always just the presence sensing.  The other issue we had to solve was to uninstall the Nest app as this was also interfering.  Once we removed the Nest app off both phones, things started working better.  It is a shame I cannot have both apps running on the phones as the Nest app gives much more control and information regarding our heating system.

Once we remotely signed all of the old phones out the home then showed both phones available correctly for the location presence sensing.  I think this should be added to the trouble shooting information as it is not obvious in the current instructions.  And most people have an old phone that they haven't fully signed out of sitting around not being used.

[nickfromgoogle · Accepted solution]

Hey @Mike9112 - Glad to hear you were able to get it working but to be clear you can have both Google Home and Nest apps installed on your phone without interference between the two apps. The main thing to remember is that you can only share phone location from one app at a time for your own account; the home / away state should reflect the same in both apps (help article for reference ). The one quirk you might see is if you share phone location from the Nest app then your Home app presence sensing settings may act like you're sharing location from a different device.

Assuming you had the same account signed in on your current device and the old phone you mentioned, tapping the "Switch to this phone" button in presence settings in the Home app will switch phone location to use your current device and shouldn't pull from the older phone. Did you happen to have your old phone named the same as the current one? Something like "Mike's Pixel" may cause confusion in the settings UI if they're named the same since there's no context of which "Mike's Pixel" is the new vs. old phone. 

I appreciate the feedback; I'll review with my team to see if we can incorporate some better troubleshooting for this scenario.

[Mike9112]

It has now gotten to the point where I have had to delete the home and create a new one.  And this includes changing over all of my devices to the new home, and yes that is a big hassle.

Updates:  Still can only have one phone at a time detect home and away regardless of which app is used or what settings are employed.  Final straw was the in my activity, google home could see my phone leave home.  And then did nothing, and I do mean nothing.  No adjustments to any devices.  My wife has just given up and manually now sets the home and away.  I am more persistant.

Currently it is still hit and miss as to if home detects me leaving or arriving.  Normally it is the thermostat that detects no activity so goes into away mode, nothing to do with my phone location

[nickfromgoogle]

Hey @Mike9112 - Sorry to hear you're still having issues. That doesn't sound like it's working as expected. Can you fill out our contact form  so we can debug this issue further? Please let me know once you've filled it out. Thanks!

[Mike9112]

Form submitted

[nickfromgoogle]

Perfect, thanks @Mike9112. Our team will follow up to get some more info on your issue.

[Mike9112]

I have now fixed my original issue.

Don't do what Google recommends.  Ignore and disable all of the Presence Sensing systems on Google Home.  Enable them all on the Google Nest App, now everything will work as it is supposed to.

Since disabling anything to do with location tracking on Google Home, my systems all work correctly.  This includes my wife who did the same.  Now when we leave the house independently the home will switch to away, including the thermostat that will now change to eco mode.  None of which was reliably working with Google Home.

After reviewing the products I am using in the home (Nest learning thermostat, Nest hub Max), I realised that the Google Home system didn't actually need to know my location.  This wasn't a conflict between the two systems, it was simply that one works and one does not.

The moral of the story is, if it is made for Nest use Nest.  If it is made for Google, use Google.

I have other devices such as a Google Doorbell (battery) that works fine on Google Home as I didn't need to set this up on Nest (even though it is a Nest product).  However, due to the issues I have had, I will not be purchasing additional hardware from Google.  I will get other products from other manufacturers that will integrate with Google Home.  But I will keep the other manufacturers app and run everything via that as it seems to work better.

[thomashill51]

I have a somewhat similar issue, and hoped someone could help. I have several of the new generation Nest Camera (Indoor, Wired) connected to my Google Home account.  They are set up in the Home/Away routines with Presence Sensing for my phone (iPhone 15) and my wife's phone (iPhone 14). She is added to the Google Home account as a manager, as I am.  I've verified that both phones have "Location:  Always" allowed.  I set the Away routine to turn the camera ON, and the Home routine to turn the camera OFF.

It works OK when my wife and I leave together.  But when I leave by myself, the home switches to "Away" and camera turns on when I leave, even though my wife is still home.  This happens all the time. In the Presence sensing settings, my “phone location” properly shows away or home. In her phone it says “your using this feature on a different phone. You can switch to this iPhone”. Of course, when you switch it over to her phone, then my phone no longer uses presence sensing to activate and turn off cameras?

In the Home App history, I can see "Your Phone Left Home" at say 6AM.  Immediately thereafter, the home "Switched to away even though my wife's phone is still there and added to the account?

I've tried enabling and disabling "Location, removing and reinstalling the app’s etc. and it doesn't seem to make a difference. I would be grateful for any suggestions…

[Mike9112]

Morning,

The only way I got it to work was to disable everything on Google Home and run it all through Nest.

Just to add as well, we found out my wifes account was linked to an old phone we had forgotten about so had to disable the account on that phone.  All the phones used were Android based, so not sure if this will apply to Apple.

Please be aware that I am in the preview version now as well, and one feature they have done is to take away the control of cameras from Nest and migrated them to Home.  Not sure if this will affect things now or not.

The biggest thing is to disable the presence sensing on Home.  Then set it all up on Nest.  Nest will then set it up on Home afterwards.  Just a little detail that Google doesn't tell you.  They insisted that everything goes through Home, but don't.  You will only scream at your phone wondering why it wont work.

[thomashill51]

Thank you for the suggestion, unfortunately, that does not seem to work either. Essentially Google Home does not allow both of our phones to be used for location for home and away routines, it's either one or the other. Whether I set it up through Nest or Google Home, it behaves the same. Seems odd, such a basic thing being problematic, one would think it would be a common thing to want to do..

[ChrisB72]

Overriding thing is that presence sensing does not work correctly in either app. The Away and Home routines locked into Home do not work either.

Such rubbish to mislead people and take up all their time trying to fix issues that are unfixable.