TimothyWMurray Posted May 19, 2014 Share Posted May 19, 2014 I added 2 Trane TZ400BB3VZNNSL - Z-Wave Thermostats to my Staples Connect. They were easy to add. These thermostats have no way to program them except through a zwave control. They have manual buttons, but no scheduling. That is fine because I have my Staples Connect and always intended to use it to schedule them. I had two surprises when doing this, maybe someone has a helpful tip. Staples Connect has activities. When setting these up you must choose scheduled or manual. Both of my surprises come from the interaction of scheduled and manual activities. 1) I set up a several scheduled activities with names like "wife working from home", "kids home from school", and "sleep time temperature" And each of these triggers at a set time on a set group of days of the week. I gave them names like this because I sort of expected that these same activities could also be triggered manually. Turns out they can not. I had to create essentially the same activities but in the manual activities section. A little extra set up, but this gets the job done. 2) I then set up a manual activity called "vacation temperature" in the manual activities. But if I run this activity, it will only run until the next scheduled activity kicks in. I don't think I can put the regular schedule into suspend mode. I guess am mentally modeling an activity (temperature settings) as a separate level of abstraction from the trigger (manual or scheduled). This led me to assume a bunch of possibilities that just are not there in the Staples Connect. Any help is appreciated. Would I be able to do what I'm trying to do if I had a different hub? By the way I bought the thermostats from http://www.zwaveproducts.com/ and the have great customer service. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
TimothyWMurray Posted May 21, 2014 Author Share Posted May 21, 2014 I posted more or less the same question in the Staple Connect support site and got a response that they are working on adding modes. https://staplesconnect.zendesk.com/hc/communities/public/questions/201062934-How-do-I-override-scheduled-activities-with-a-vacation-mode- But there is one question I asked here that I didn't ask over there: Would other hubs meet my need now? I would love to get hands on with a few different hubs and see what I can get the interface to do. (But it would make my wife crazy, "which app do I use this week?") Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
schoondoggy Posted May 29, 2014 Share Posted May 29, 2014 I am happy with SmartThings so far, but I may look at Revolv in the future. Check to see if all of your devices are supported by SmartThings. The hub is only $99, it may be worth the experiment. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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