From my reading on this forum, geofencing seems to be a bust so I'm thinking my only way to set a home/away status is with a boolean variable. The real trick- how does one trigger it? Some ideas came to mind, but they have a number of challenges:
Use the alarm panel. Maybe, but we don't set the alarm very often (small children and dogs) except on vacations. I suppose I can change my habits, but I fear a lot of false alarms to the cops.... 6 year olds are notoriously unreliable when it comes to verifying the alarm is off before they let the dog out the back door...
Program a keypad button near the door that sets home/away. That's not very "smart", but effective.
Set a timer that's reset every time a manual activity inside the house happens. TV turns on, lights turn on, etc resets the "Home" timer. Would have to figure out how to separate scheduled activities from manual ones.
My primary desire is to have the HVAC setting change based on the occupancy. My last house had a Honeywell Lyric thermostat and geofencing worked beautifully. I'm struggling with it in this new house- the builder installed Cor thermostats and they don't have geofencing....
Any other ideas?