Using IFTTT With Your Netatmo Thermostat
The Netatmo Thermostat for Smartphone is a clever bit of kit, it monitors how long it takes for your home to heat up then, after a couple of weeks, starts turning itself on early to make sure your home is at the correct temperature for you arriving home from work! Netatmo have just announced that the Thermostat now has its own Channel using IFTTT making it even smarter!
What is IFTTT?
IFTTT, meaning 'If THIS Then THAT', is a free web-based service that connects together all your smart-home devices, social media channels and smartphone to allow them all to control and monitor each other. It sounds a little complicated at first but is really simple to use, to do some great new things with your thermostat, ranging from fun novelty tricks to impress your friends to serious energy saving and time cutting features that make using your connected home set-up effortless. The best way to show what you can do with your Netatmo Thermostat and IFTTT is just to show some of the more popular 'recipies' (what IFTTT calls the instructions between two things) people have already created. Before trying any of these out you will need to sign up to the free IFTTT service and add the Netatmo Thermostat Channel.
Sample Recipies
Pairing your smartphone and Netatmo Thermostat with IFTTT allows you to add this recipe. IF 'your smartphone GPS says you have left your home' THEN 'turn your Netatmo Thermostat to Away mode'. This means any time you leave home your thermostat is notified by your phone and you will no longer have to manually set away mode yourself (or, worse, wasting unnecessary energy in heating your home while you're not there!)
Everyone knows the feeling, you've set your thermostat exactly the way you want it, sit back and relax in comfort, proud of a job well done. Then your family come home and start messing about with your settings! With this recipe you will receive an alert directly on your phone whenever someone changes the temperature! Also, if you keep it quiet that you've set it up you can appear somewhere between a Jedi and Peter Griffin.
A recipe that will probably be very rarely used but can be very useful. When your thermostat starts displaying the low battery symbol you will have had it for over a year and probably got used to the settings and not look at the display all that often. With this activated you will get an email to let you know the batteries are starting to run low with plenty of time to replace them ... as long as you can remember ... was that AA or AAA batteries?! (it's three AAA batteries)
You can also connect your thermostat to work with your Google Calendar. If you add a holiday to your calendar a message will be sent to your thermostat to set to Away mode for the duration of it and your heating will kick back in on your return so your house in nice and warm for your return.
Another way of using IFTTT is to connect two completely different products together, for example if you have Phillips Hue connected lights you can set them to turn off when your thermostat is set to away mode. This means when you're about to go out, you pop your thermostat into away mode and it turns off your lights. You can also combine recipes so if you use this one with the first example, if you leave home your phone GPS tells the thermostat to go into away mode which, in turn, tells your lights to turn off! As you can see, this is a very powerful system that has many varied applications, with more being added all the time. The above are just a small sample of what can be done with the Netatmo Thermostat. You can check out the full range of available connected services and devices or, if you don't have one yet, you can get your Netatmo Thermostat directly from Sangamo.
- Gary Black