Central heating thermostat

[Kim]

I appreciate that reliable occupancy detection is the holy grail of home automation, and most solutions are inadequate in some edge cases, but monitoring people's phones is so obviously doomed to failure that I'm amazed^[1] they even bother.


_{[1] Not really, the software was probably written by the sort of people who are glued to their phone.}

[Mrs Pingu]

It also assumes that all occupants have a phone, hence my point about without geofencing.

[Mrs Pingu]

Hmm ok, looks like I could just turn off auto-scheduling and use True Radiant to do what I want. https://support.google.com/googlenest/answer/9250165#zippy=%2Chow-true-radiant-works%2Ctrue-radiant-settings-and-opentherm-enabled-boilers
Probably a bit of a sledgehammer to crack a nut though.

[Ham]

Ok, can you tell me how the learning is accomplished in the absence of geofencing?

Geofencing is no part of it, unless you want it to be, and then AFAIK, you would probably use Android Rules to trigger - I'm not aware of any Nest Geofence capability. What the Nest does have is proximity sensor. It uses it to wakey up the unit when you get near, and to register when people are moving about. It combines that with AI smarts - eg, Mr google will work out when you are going to work - and set to away, if you let it. Also, if you are bought into the Google ecosystem (did I mention I was a fanboi?) you can tell Google assistant "Set heating to away" or "Turn heating off for next 14 days". (not a unique Google feature, part of Teh "Smart" stuffs)

At its simplest level, if you regularly turn heating up or down at a certain time it will learn and try to match, compensating for external temperature.