Homatic.ai
Energy
Vacation rental energy management
Most of the energy a short-term rental wastes is used with nobody in the building. It does not show up as a complaint, it does not show up on a review, and it does not show up until the bill — which is why it persists.
The fix is not a smarter thermostat. It is a thermostat that knows whether tonight is booked, and rules that act on the gaps rather than on the clock.
Start free — no credit card The four rules that matter
Where the waste actually is
| Situation | Why it persists |
|---|---|
| Vacant nights at guest comfort | Nobody is there to notice, and a schedule cannot tell a vacant night from a booked one |
| The gap between checkout and the next check-in | Often days, and always treated as though the guest is still there |
| HVAC running with a door or window open | A guest opens the patio door and drops the AC to 64; the system runs flat out against outside air |
| A guest’s setpoint left in place after they leave | Whatever they set is what the building holds until someone changes it |
| Pre-heating too early | A fixed 8am start conditions the property for a guest arriving at 9pm |
Every row has the same shape: the building is doing something reasonable for a situation that ended. Occupancy is the missing input.
The four rules worth writing first
1. Checkout setback
After checkout, fall back to a holding temperature. This is the single highest-value energy rule in a rental, because it covers the largest number of hours. Mark it once per stay and it happens once, rather than again each time a cleaner trips a sensor that afternoon.
2. Pre-arrival, sized to the property
Bring the property up a set number of minutes before check-in — booking-driven, so a late arrival moves it and a cancellation never fires it. Give it a longer lead than feels necessary if the property has been sitting at a vacant setback; the saving comes from the setback, not from trimming the recovery.
3. Door-open HVAC
The useful version is a watchdog rather than a one-shot, and it is three steps:
- Remember the current setpoint and set the holding one — once.
- Re-assert it every couple of minutes while the door stays open, so a manual change is undone rather than winning.
- Restore the remembered setpoint when the door closes.
The re-assert step must not also remember, or it re-snapshots every cycle and overwrites the value it is protecting. Homatic refuses to save that combination rather than letting you discover it in July.
4. Freeze protection — separate from the setback
If the indoor temperature falls below your floor, raise the setpoint and notify. Keep this distinct from your vacant setpoint, because that separation is what makes a failing furnace distinguishable from a working setback. Cap the attempts and attach an escalation, so a thermostat that cannot be reached tells you rather than retrying into the void.
Automate your rental thermostat → Describe the rule in a sentence; Homatic checks it against the thermostat you actually have.
An illustrative example
This is arithmetic with assumptions stated, not a measured result. We have no customer savings data and will not present any.
Take a property booked 60% of nights. That is roughly 146 vacant nights a year. Suppose a vacant-night setback reduces HVAC energy on those nights by some fraction f of a comfort-conditioned night’s cost c:
146 × c × f
Fill in your own numbers. If a conditioned night costs $4 in HVAC and a setback saves half of it, that is 146 × $4 × 0.5 ≈ $292 a year for one property. Your c depends on your climate, envelope and fuel; your f depends how deep a setback you are willing to run and how long recovery takes.
The point of the arithmetic is not the total. It is that the term that dominates is vacant nights — a number your calendar already knows and your thermostat does not.
Why the degrees have to be handled carefully
This sounds like a footnote and is the difference between a rule that works and one that re-fires forever.
You think in whole degrees Fahrenheit; the thermostat stores Celsius. 71 °F is 21.666… °C, while a threshold typed as “71” saves as 21.7. Compared strictly, a thermostat sitting exactly on target reads as below it — so a rule that sets a setpoint and watches that same setpoint never satisfies itself and re-fires on every poll, each run logged green. Homatic normalizes both sides to a tenth of a degree, which is coarser than the conversion error and finer than any threshold a person means.
It also warns when a condition’s threshold and an action’s setpoint are within half a degree of each other, because a rule that targets its own boundary is fragile however the numbers round.
Seeing where it goes
Setbacks are most of the saving and need only a thermostat. If you want to see consumption rather than infer it, circuit and whole-home monitors are supported — Sense, Emporia Vue, Curb, Neurio and Rainforest — and water monitors including Flume, Moen Flo and Phyn, which are as much a leak defence as a usage one.
Runtime is derived from the event stream rather than counted, which matters because counting starts tells you nothing: a six-minute cycle and a six-hour one both roll up as one start. Homatic pairs start and stop into episodes with durations, indoor and outdoor temperature at each end — and a run it could not close is reported as a floor rather than quietly measured to now.
Which thermostats
Google Nest — both the shared integration and a bring-your-own path where you run your own Google Device Access project so the quota and fee are yours. Honeywell. ecobee, which has paused new developer-app registrations, so an ecobee reached through a SmartThings hub is often the working route today. Thermostats on SmartThings, Hubitat, Homey and Home Assistant.
Homatic will tell you which routes reach a given brand, which are switched on here, and what each route can and cannot do — rather than showing a card that leads nowhere.
Thermostat automation in detail → · Checkout automation →
Common questions
Where does the waste actually happen in a short-term rental?
In the gaps. A property held at guest comfort on nights nobody is booked costs money continuously and invisibly, because nobody is there to notice. That is the difference occupancy-driven setbacks address.
Can I stop the AC running with a door open?
Yes, and the useful version is a watchdog rather than a one-shot: while a door or window is open, re-assert the setback so a manual change does not quietly undo it, then restore the original setpoint when it closes.
Will a setback risk freezing pipes in winter?
That is exactly why the vacant setpoint and the freeze alert are separate things. Set the vacant temperature where you want it, and a low-temperature alert below it, so a failing furnace becomes a message rather than a discovery.
Do I need a smart electricity meter?
No. The setbacks are the bulk of it and need only a thermostat. Circuit-level monitors such as Sense, Emporia Vue and Curb are supported if you want per-circuit visibility on top.
See Homatic on your own properties
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