Arriving/Leaving Home Annoyance

The new Arriving/Leaving Home functionality is a great idea with a currently less than optimal implementation. I posted another issue in another thread. This issue relates to reliability.

I have a foyer light controlled by a Caseta dimmer and, generally, it functions great. However, the scene is driving me nuts. Why? It constantly thinks I'm leaving home and coming back. My phone will be sitting on a foyer table, not moving and yet the foyer light will suddenly turn on for no reason throughout the night. Most mornings I wake to find the light on.

In testing what I THINK is happening is that the system loses track of my phone and takes that to mean I've departed and then, when it reconnects, it believes I've returned. I also suspect this could be easily resolved by allowing for a grace period. If, for example, the time between loss and reconnect is a matter of X minutes (say, 5) or less, then simply ignore that cycle.

Hoping maybe there's a solution or that support will pass this on. I can fix this myself with an IFTTT recipe, but would prefer not to have to run another solution just for this task.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Agrajag

The new Arriving/Leaving Home functionality is a great idea with a currently less than optimal implementation. I posted another issue in another thread. This issue relates to reliability.

I have a foyer light controlled by a Caseta dimmer and, generally, it functions great. However, the scene is driving me nuts. Why? It constantly thinks I'm leaving home and coming back. My phone will be sitting on a foyer table, not moving and yet the foyer light will suddenly turn on for no reason throughout the night. Most mornings I wake to find the light on.

In testing what I THINK is happening is that the system loses track of my phone and takes that to mean I've departed and then, when it reconnects, it believes I've returned. I also suspect this could be easily resolved by allowing for a grace period. If, for example, the time between loss and reconnect is a matter of X minutes (say, 5) or less, then simply ignore that cycle.

Hoping maybe there's a solution or that support will pass this on. I can fix this myself with an IFTTT recipe, but would prefer not to have to run another solution just for this task.

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I just installed my system a few weeks ago and I'm having the same problem, and more. Smart Away can't distinguish when I'm actually home or away, and is turning itself back on after I turn it off. It's quite the annoyance, as it's turning on 100% lighting (I've got super bright recessed LEDs) while I'm trying to watch tv. It'd be nice if Lutron support would chime in with some suggestions, here.

Support informed me that development is aware of the issue and is addressing it. However, as usual, no specifics were provided. As a dev architect I have to wonder about the full vision of a fix. For me, there must be a grace period to solve this. Without it, every minor wifi dropout is going to trigger it falsely. We'll see. Frankly I do have faith as we weren't even going to get this functionality to start with. They clearly want to be competitive and this is the path to that goal.

I have found why this happens.
Last night when I got back, on of my Smart Away lights was on.
I remembered that about 10 minutes after leaving my home I got a low battery alert at 20% on my iPhone.
It asked if I want to turn on Low Power Mode, for which I replied yes.
After getting home, to try and troubleshoot this, I went into settings and turned Low Power Mode off. Immediately, that light turned off!
So here is what I discovered:
In the Lutron Caseta app settings (in the iPhone settings, not the app settings), Background App Refresh is always on, and is grayed out so that it cannot be turned off. Background App Refresh being on is how the app knows your location. BUT, when the iPhone is put into Low Power Mode, the Background App Refresh turns off automatically. When off, Location for the app is not active, so the app does not know there the iPhone is.

I have found a reason as to why this happens.
Last night when I got back, on of my Smart Away lights was on.
I remembered that about 10 minutes after leaving my home I got a low battery alert at 20% on my iPhone.
It asked if I want to turn on Low Power Mode, for which I replied yes.
After getting home, to try and troubleshoot this, I went into settings and turned Low Power Mode off. Immediately, that light turned off!
So here is what I discovered:
In the Lutron Caseta app settings (in the iPhone settings, not the app settings), Background App Refresh is always on, and is grayed out so that it cannot be turned off. Background App Refresh being on is how the app knows your location. BUT, when the iPhone is put into Low Power Mode, the Background App Refresh turns off automatically. When off, Location for the app is not active, so the app does not know there the iPhone is.

To sum it up, in order for the Lutron Caseta app to work properly with Smart Away and Geofencing, Low Power Mode must be turned off.

P.S. Sorry for the double post, I thought I was editing my post, not creating another one.

What you can also do is to increase the radius of your "home". If your phone drops wifi for even a second, then your location based of the cell tower could cause you to look away. Then when wifi reconnects, you are home again.