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After over a year of working perfectly, the Arriving home scene has suddenly started acting weird. Randomly throughout the night, the scene will activate (lights associated with the scene will turn on), even though my phone is sitting right next to me. I have tried disabling/enabling the feature, resetting my home location, deleting the app from my phone and reinstalling. All to no avail. Any tips on how I can troubleshoot this?
This can happen if your phone is switching between wifi and cell service. If you increase the size of the "home" area this should help.
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This can happen if your phone is switching between wifi and cell service. If you increase the size of the "home" area this should help.
I have found a reason as to why this may happen.
A while ago when I got back home, 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.
turns out, Background App Refresh was disabled for Lutron on my phone. testing now to see if that solves the problem!
just to confirm - the issue is now resolved that i enabled Background App Refresh for the Lutron app. Thanks for the tip!!
This is great info! I did not realize that enabling Low Power Mode automatically disabled background app refresh (and I have used this feature several times myself). I have updated our internal troubleshooting documentation to include this info and I will be sending an update to our Caseta Tech Support agents!
Zach - just clarify - in my case, Background App Refresh was permanently turned off (I'm not sure if I did that or if it just happened that way). Perhaps the app should be configured to warn the user when it is off that geofencing will not work properly.
Well, I hate to even post this because I don't want to cause more confusion, but here we go...
I let my battery drain and enabled Low Power Mode when prompted, confirmed background app refresh was automatically disabled (and "grayed out"), and I still received my leaving home notification right on queue. I did have Wi-Fi and Bluetooth enabled and Lutron is "Always" allowed access to my Location Services. I'm running an iPhone 7 plus, iOS 10.2.1, version 4.1.1 on the Caseta app.
I'd like to test it with the refresh permanently turned off (like tims300). I know we recently made some improvements in our app to help with the accuracy of our arriving/leaving home features, and those changes may have been implemented since davisadm experienced his issue.
That being said, I still think it's a great thing to check if you are experiencing issues with Arriving/Leaving home features. It has obviously already fixed the problem for several users!