My thermostat (Honeywell T6 Pro) will often change randomly to the away temperature even when I am home. I have geo-fencing disabled, so the only time it is supposed to change to “away” mode is when I set the alarm system to “Away.”
For example, right now I just noticed that the temperature is set to 86 (My “away” temperature, +1 degree for weather savings event), even though I haven’t set the system to Away since Sunday.
Is it possible for you guys to see more detailed logs of temperature changes from the system, to see what is causing this? I can’t see any temperature change occur.
Also, for info, my T6 thermostat has “Home” selected in the LCD panel, so I know it’s not stuck on Away or anything.
Just so you have a timeline for debugging purposes: I’m changing the temperature now back to my Home temp, but prior to this posting time (I’m assuming for most of the day since the AC hasn’t come on) it was wrongly set.
Thermostat Weather Event - Energy Savings (Today)
8/20/2024 12:45:15 pm
Thermostat Sensor Left Open Thermostat Restoral
8/20/2024 12:10:04 pm
Z-Wave Generic Command: Node id=6, Thermostat Mode set to: Auto (Automated) [(Acknowledged at 8/20/2024 12:10:05 pm) ACK Token: 26]
8/20/2024 12:10:04 pm
Monitor -Thermostat Sensor Left Open Thermostat Change
8/20/2024 10:50:02 am
Command - Z-Wave Generic Command: Node id=6, Thermostat Mode set to: Off (Automated) [(Acknowledged at 8/20/2024 10:50:03 am)]
8/20/2024 10:50:02 am
This trouble is a common issue without a known fix, discussions can be found here and here. Often disabling then reenabling the rules can resolve the issue. If no success, try rebooting your panel and report back if you are still having the troubles.
Thanks for the reply. I was doing the troubleshooting steps you mentioned over the last week. I disabled / re-enabled the rule end of last week, and I also rebooted the panel on Sunday of this week.
Just noticed this morning my thermostat is set to 85 degrees again, so it seems not to have fixed it.
One point of interest is that a singular time, Aug 21, 2024 10:01pm PT, there is an item in the activity page in my Alarm.com app that says:
Thermostat Cool Target Temp Changed to 85.0 F
But there is no user input or reason for the change mentioned – are you able to see any reason for the change in the logs on your end?
There is no command associated with it, just a report from the system that the temp was changed. When you just see the event line like that it means it was a local change. This could be from one of a few sources.
Usually it means someone manually changed the temperature. It may also be caused by internal schedules on the thermostat. Some 3rd party thermostats may have onboard schedules that conflict with ADC.
The Honeywell T6 Pro I believe is one that can do this. I would recommend making sure that local schedules are disabled on the thermostat.
I looked into my T6 menus and the schedule option doesn’t even exist.
According to the T6 user manual:
Schedule menu is available only if time based schedule or smart schedule is configured
This leaves me with “occupancy” based schedule being the one selected, which would have to be managed by the z-wave controller.
I can also tell you that when the temperature is incorrectly changed to 85 degrees, my thermostat still says “Home” as the occupancy status, if that information helps at all.
Well, I did all the resets and it worked fine for about 4-5 days, but now the last couple days it has been randomly setting to a higher temperature again.
I believe it happened yesterday midday, and now it happened maybe around 9pm tonight (85 degrees). I then set the temperature back down to 78 degrees.
Just a few minutes ago it set to 84 degrees (which is weird, it has never set itself to this temperature).
The first time it set to 85 degrees tonight, there was no notification on my phone or log in the activity section. But the second time (10:02pm) there was a notification that it changed.
I just realized about the 84 degrees vs 85 degrees:
When I had set up the thermostat again after factory resetting, in Alarm.com I programmed my “Away” temp to 84 degrees this time (and by the way, I just went in and reduced this to 81 degrees, in case you go and look at my rules). Before 9:45pm when the thermostat was unexpectedly set to 85 degrees, I believe that is because of the smart savings for extreme weather, which offset my settings by 1 degree (thus 85 degrees).
To me this also gives evidence that it is not the thermostat itself randomly changing the temperature setting, and is in fact something being sent from the panel/Alarm.com. Because even if it did have a schedule turned on internally, which it does not, it doesn’t have the capability on its own to bump the temperature settings by a degree when the weather is “extreme.”
I can confirm with no uncertainty that the event is local to the system. There are no commands at those times, the temperature change is an event reported by your panel.
I can also confirm that the event does not correlate to arming events, so if it is Smart Away that would be a bug.
It looks like you had extreme weather override active at 9:45ish AM on 9/4, so the suggestion about that being the difference between 84 and 85 is likely.
Did you previously have Smart Away using Geo-services too, or just always based on arming? If this reoccurs now, does it reflect that new 81 degree Away temp?
If you turn off Smart Away does the behavior stop altogether?
Yes geo-based smart away was enabled, but I disabled it a couple months ago as my first troubleshooting step to this issue.
If you’re suggesting that something about this has lingered with the rule even though I turned it off, I would assume the fact of removing the thermostat (which completely resets all thermostat based rules) would have cleared that?
I’ll have to leave everything as-is for a bit to see if the 81 temp gets reflected in any of these random temp changes and then report back.
If that does happen, I’ll then attempt disabling smart away scheduling entirely and see if it discontinues then and let you know.
Well, that didn’t take long.
I just checked the thermostat and it is set to 81 even though I’ve been home and haven’t touched the thermostat settings, apart from the change to the programmed away temp when I was logged into alarm.com this morning
Thanks, that certainly helps suggest the issue, though it doesn’t make much sense. That means that Smart away is being triggered on the panel without any triggering event. I haven’t seen this previously, to my memory.
I’ll let ADC know the testing you’ve done and confirm what it appears to be. Can you change the away temperature this time to 83, then disable smart away so that it should not run at all, and let us know if it occurs again?
I’m curious if it will properly stop working when the rule is not enabled.
Okay, I did what you said. There are some interesting things that occurred that I want to mention.
So, without having touched my thermostat - it was still set to 81 - I went into the thermostat schedule settings on Alarm.com and changed the Away temperature, as you had requested, to 83.
After saving that, a few seconds later, the thermostat changed its temperature to 84 (very hot today, so extreme weather mode was in effect). So this indicates that the panel seems to think that it needs to use away settings for my thermostat?
Then, I toggled the Smart Away automation OFF. I checked the thermostat, waited a few minutes, and nothing changed.
I went back into the Smart Away automation settings, where it was still toggled off, but this time I unchecked the “System is Armed Away” selection for “when” to use Smart Away, and then I saved these settings.
Immediately after I did that, the thermostat kicked down to my Home temperature.
With all that, it sounds to me like the panel - in some way - thinks that the system is armed, and so is using settings pertaining to an Armed status, even though it obviously is not?? I don’t know what to make of it really.
Beyond all this, I’ll keep the Smart Away switched fully off and over the next few days see if there are any temperature changes to report.
Yeah that sounds like the panel is not using arming status correctly as the trigger. I suspect it will not resume the behavior while off and both triggers unchecked.
I am sending this info to ADC to investigate, but this is an odd case I have not seen before.
One more thing to try, I would recommend updating the firmware of your panel to the latest to see if that resolves this behavior/resets the responsible software process.