home/away assist disabled but still switches to away

[macleod0722]

I have a Nest thermostat upstairs and a Nest Learning thermostat downstairs. Both have "presence sensing" turned off. On the Nest Learning thermostat, I have also disabled "Home/Away assist" AND using the phone location AND under "what decides if you're home", the question "should this thermostat use its activity sensors to figure out if anyone's home?" is answered 'no'. The thermostat still goes to "away" every evening when we leave the room for a couple of hours. Plus, in the history, there are multiple events every day ... when the "Home/Away assist" is disabled!!

Guidance says, "Important: If you disable both phone location and all products from helping with Home/Away Assist, your home won’t automatically switch between Home and Away modes. You’ll need to switch modes manually with the Nest app."  THIS IS WHAT I WANT TO BE ABLE TO DO!!! I WANT TO SWITCH MANUALLY ... WHEN WE ACTUALLY LEAVE THE HOUSE. 

How do I make this happen?

[AxelD]

Hi macleod0722,

Thanks for posting in the community! Sorry to hear about this situation of your Nest Thermostat switching to Home/Away mode without your request. No worries, help is here! According to the article about Nest Home and Away not working there are some factors that may affect:

• Use only one phone for presence sensing

1. Open the Google Home app Google Home app.
2. Tap Settings > Presence sensing.
3. Select the devices that you want to use for presence sensing. These devices help determine if everyone's away or someone's home.

• Check that someone else didn't change the settings. Anyone that you've invited to share control of your home can also change the following settings:

1. Enable or disable your home from using phones' locations to help your home automatically switch.
2. Choose which devices can automatically switch as you come and go.
3. Enable or disable activity sensors for specific devices.

Let's see if your Home structure is being shared with other devices and change the settings. 

Let me know how it goes.

Regards,

Axel. 

[macleod0722]

I appreciate your response. But I don't think you understood my problem. I do NOT want to use ANY phone or ANY presence sensing. The only other person who has access to our Google Home is my husband and all of his settings are set the same way as mine (see above) - ALL questions regarding presence sensing, using the phone etc are turned to "off" or "no". "Home/Away Assist" is turned to off. We do NOT want it to assist us. I want it to stay on 'Home' until one of us manually tells it that we are 'Away'. I'm not sure how to make this any clearer.

[AxelD]

Hi macleod0722,

Thanks for replying! I completely understand your situation. The steps above are to confirm if there's another phone that might be changing your settings. In this case as you indicated, there isn't. Let's try some other troubleshooting steps:

1. Perform a Factory Reset on your thermostat: Go to Settings > Reset > Home/Away
2. If the issue persists, Settings > Reset > All Settings
3. Remove the Nest Thermostat from the Nest App
4. Re-connect it back to the app

Let me know how it goes.

Regards,

Axel. 

[macleod0722]

I have done step 1 many times. I will do the other step if necessary. We haven't had an "event" since June 30 where there were several "no activity in the house" (when the Home/Away Assist was disabled). I've done a reset since then so maybe that helped. 

I cannot find the answer to this question anywhere ... for how long must there be no activity before the thermostat decides you're away? (assuming you are using presence sensing - which I'm currently not!)

[AxelD]

Hi macleod0722,

Thanks for your reply! You're right, there isn't a set time for the Home/Away feature to activate. It turns on automatically because the Google Home app uses your phone's location and assumes you're home if you're within a 200-meter radius.

Regards,
Axel.

[macleod0722]

Ok, then it clearly wasn't working - because my phone was home the entire time it was switching to Away!! Let's hope it is working after the reset. We recently had an HVAC guy here for a different reason and he said the Nest thermostats have to be reset frequently, particularly after a power outage.

[Nest_Loather_1]

I continually have to deal with this and several other Nest malfunctions. 

"AxelD,"  Google Home > Settings  does not provide any "Presence sensing" option, nor do the 21 submenus at that level, nor any deeper submenus of Google Home I just lost another 20 minutes re-cave diving.

Since March I've lost many hours:

• doing several factory resets
• painstakingly dial-re-entering my wi-fi password
• fishing through every screen with the awkward, time-wasting dial
• checking every possible box in both the Nest & Google home apps that claims to stop “sensing,” "assisting," and “Eco”-ing

…and Nest still makes spontaneous, radical temperature adjustments entirely on its own. I regularly wake up to the fan blowing extreme cold air conditioning in the middle of the night after having specified an exact temperature, or having shut all heat/cool settings to OFF.

Does Nest need me to sleepwalk past its “activity sensors” every 20 minutes to feel confident that I haven’t left the house at 3am? There are no other users/pets.

I’ve lost more time each week dealing with Nest malfunctions than in the preceding 40+ years of simply turning a manual thermostat off when I left & on when I returned. Before Nest I honestly can’t recall any person ever complaining about a thermostat at all. Nest sufferers are everywhere.

Please, "AxelD" just tell us how to permanently disable the constantly malfunctioning presence sensing" by using the current version of either of these genuinely terrible apps.

[macleod0722]

We recently went out of town and set our Nest thermostat to "Away" manually. It made NO difference. While the Nest app clearly said we were "Away", the thermostat performed its usual schedule, with no regard for the Eco temperatures it was supposed to be using (when "Away"). I agree that it is much more hassle than it is worth!