Note: These instructions are for Google Nest products you manage in the Nest app. For products managed in the Home app, you can find instructions in Change Home & Away Routines settings.
With Home/Away Assist, all of your Nest products can automatically change their behavior as people come and go. For example, it can turn on your Nest Cam to help you keep an eye on things when you leave home, and turn it off when you’re home and don’t need it.
To learn how Home/Away Assist uses presence sensing to adjust your devices, go to our How your home automatically switches to Home or Away article.
To tell if someone’s home, Home/Away Assist can use the location of any phones or tablets signed in to an app account that shares access to your home, as well as the activity sensors in some of your Nest products. You may want to change some of your Home/Away Assist settings to help it do a better job. Select a topic below for detailed settings instructions.
Need troubleshooting help?
For detailed troubleshooting steps that go beyond changing these settings, please go to our Troubleshoot automatic home and device switching article.
Change what Nest products do when you're home or away
To change how Home/Away Assist controls your Nest products, follow these steps.
- Open the Nest app.
- Tap Settings
on the home screen.
- Select Home/Away Assist.
- Tap either the Home or Away icon at the top of the screen. You’ll find a summary of what each of your Nest products will do when your home is in that mode.
- If you want to make any changes, tap on the Nest product you’d like to control.
In general, if you have multiple Nest products in your home, you have different settings for each one. However, all Nest Protects in your home share the same Home/Away Assist settings, so you’ll only find one Protect in this list.
Settings for each product’s Home/Away Assist options are listed below.
Nest thermostats
Here you can choose whether or not your Google Nest thermostat will switch to Eco Temperatures when your home is set to Away.
Tap the switch near the top of the menu to enable or disable this option.
The “How It Responds” section tells you what happens when your home is in each mode:
- Home - On means your thermostat will use your regular schedule whenever anybody’s home.
- Away - Eco Temperatures means your thermostat will switch itself to Eco Temperatures when no one’s home.
Tap Eco Temperatures at the bottom of the menu if you want to change the Eco Temperatures that your thermostat will try to maintain when you’re gone.
Note: Because your thermostat tries to help save energy when it’s set to Eco Temperatures, it won’t turn on your HVAC equipment in advance to meet a scheduled temperature.
Nest cameras and doorbells
Tap the switch to set whether or not each Google Nest camera or doorbell will turn on or off automatically when your home switches between Home and Away.
Keep in mind that cameras aren’t switched by all the same triggers as other Nest products. Cameras are only switched by your phone’s location or if you manually change your home’s mode to Home or Away.
How your camera works with Home/Away Assist
Important: If you've set a schedule for your camera, it will switch according to both the schedule and Home/Away Assist. This can cause confusing behavior, so we recommend that you don’t set a schedule if your camera is set up with Home/Away Assist.
Nest Protects
If you have a 2nd gen Nest Protect, you’ll see an option for Sound Check. 1st generation Protects don’t run Sound Check.
Sound Check will always try to run when nobody is home so it won’t disturb you. So there is no option to change it to run while you’re at home, but you can disable Sound Check completely.
Tap Sound Check options to change whether all your Protects will run once a month and at your preferred times.
Nest × Yale Lock
You can enable Auto-Lock for Nest × Yale Lock. When Auto-Lock is on, your lock will automatically re-lock itself after it’s been unlocked.
You can turn Auto-Lock on for Home, Away, or both. You can also choose how long your lock will wait before re-locking itself.
Use your phone's location with Home/Away Assist
Home/Away Assist uses data from your Nest product’s sensors and your phone’s Wi-Fi and cellular location data to know when someone is home. For the best experience, make sure that everyone with shared access and control of your Nest products in the app is also using their phone’s location.
Each person can only have one phone to help with Home/Away Assist. If you have more than one, enable Home/Away Assist on the device that you usually carry with you.
Phone location can make Home/Away Assist more accurate, but it can be disabled if you want. To enable or disable phone location, follow these steps:
- Open the Nest app.
- Tap Settings
- Select Home/Away Assist.
- Choose What decides if you’re home.
- Select Use phone location.
- Tap the switch to expand the menu. This will show a list of all the people with shared control of your Nest home.
Note: While you can check whose phones are being used to help with Home/Away Assist, you can't enable or disable location for any phone except your own. Everyone else will have to change these settings on their own phone in the Nest app.
- Tap your name.
- Tap the switch to enable or disable phone location for Home/Away Assist.
Note: Each person can only use one phone to share one phone location at a time. If you’ve already enabled phone location on one phone, enabling it on a different phone will disable it on the first phone.
If you're already sharing your phone location using the Nest app, enabling it in the Home app will disable it in the Nest app. You can only use one app to share phone location at a time.
You can also turn off phone location in your phone’s main settings menu, but this will not only affect the accuracy of Home/Away Assist, it may change how other apps on your phone work, too.
Change which Nest products help determine if someone is home
In addition to phone location, Home/Away Assist can use information from the activity sensors in your Nest products.
The following Nest products can help Home/Away Assist figure out whether anyone is home.
- Nest thermostat
- Nest Protect
- Nest × Yale lock
Other Nest products don’t participate in this way.
Here’s how to change which Nest products share data from their activity sensors with Home/Away Assist.
- Open the Nest app.
- Tap Settings
- Select Home/Away Assist.
- Tap What decides if you’re home.
- Select a Nest product, then tap the switch to enable or disable its participation in Home/Away Assist.
If you find “No participating products,” it’s because you don’t have any of the products listed above.
Important: If you disable both phone location and all products from helping with Home/Away Assist, your home won’t automatically switch between Home and Away modes. You’ll need to switch modes manually with the Nest app.
Here are some details about how each Nest product helps Home/Away Assist: