How do I geofence to control home heat/cooling?

I live in Atlanta and have worked from home for 20 years. As such, I never really felt compelled to 'make smart' my thermostat. It is programmable so it adjusts the temp to user-specified values at user-specified times. But essentially, it keeps the house at a steady comfortable temp all day and evening since someone is typically home all the time. But like all US IBM Marketing employees, I have been called back into the office. And my partner has a somewhat unpredictable work schedule. So this means on a given day, someone may not be home for 8+ hours or perhaps home all day. This provides the incentive to have a thermostat that adjusts based on occupancy. But my partner doesn't want to come home to a hot house in the summer and have to wait for the cooling.

So I'm wondering if geofencing is the right approach. I've never used it so unsure (a) what apps/plug-ons exist that can help (b) is this technology reasonably reliable? We both have an Android phone with a data plan so the theory would be when one of us is within x mile radius of the house, the thermostat would kick-off to reach the "home" temp and when we both leave (which is fairly detectable since the alarm (connected to Indigo) gets armed), it adjusts the thermostat to "away" temp.

Looking for any best practices, ideas, suggestions or caveats.

The Home App for HomeKit can do this, and Indigo can notice changes it makes then react to them.

There's also Home Remote in the App Store, or DomoPad for Android. Both of these do geofencing and talk directly to Indigo. I use Home Remote and it works more or less flawlessly, though do read through the instructions here in the forum about it because the user interface for the iPhone app is about the most unintuitive one I've ever seen.

All 3 of these apps are capable of not only reporting home/not home, but also "work" "10 minutes from home" etc.

I would do what you're talking about in a heartbeat if I didn't have a highly proprietary Carrier Infinity HVAC system that will cost me north of $1000 to get to the point that Indigo can talk to it.

Awesome. I have DomoPad installed on my Android and setting up a geofence was super simple. Now I just need to decide on a connected thermostat. Curious to know if folks use just a simple low-cost connected thermostat (since Indigo would presumably be the 'brains') or is it better to just go with the top of the line (Nest or Ecobee3). I'll read through some of those forums to see what features folks find useful and of course what functions best.

I've thought about geofencing but I don't see how the times can work out?? Say I set a 10 mile geo-fence. Generally that is only about 15 minutes driving time at highway speeds. That's not long enough to cool the house. When "away", I'll let the house temp rise to 80 F and want it to cool to about 74 F. For my system, that can take an hour or more depending on the outside conditions. For much of my career, my commute home was an hour or less.

Maybe your AC systems can do a lot more BTUs than mine but a geo-fence has never seemed very practical to me.

Craig

That's a good point to consider. Perhaps the 'right' approach in this situation is to balance the away temp with the distance of geofence. So if it can drop the home temp 5 degrees per 30 mins, then perhaps I only raise it by 5 degrees in away mode. But that means my geofence needs to be 30 mins which isn't nearly as effective since I work about 30 mins away. I can always adjust the temp remotely before I start heading home, but that isn't as automated as I was hoping for.

I can't comment on what kind of thermostat, but I do like bad-mouthing Nest because they cost me $700 to replace a control board when their tech support tried guesswork to get it to work with my system.