Like you say, groups make it easy to solve this. I expect the number of people with >1 controllers is very small.
P.
Groups make it work, but I don't call a kludge like that a solution. Duplicating every mode with a group is more than a little bit Mickey Mouse....in my humble opinion. It is, to what I think is your broader point, very much a first world problem and not one I am going to get high blood pressure over.
Ok, we are lucky enough to have two locations with Evohome, but that was one of the reasons Evohome was so attractive given the ease of changing modes and controlling individual rooms remotely. You may be correct that the number of people with more than one installation isn't enormous but to me that doesn't constitute an excuse for lazy programming.
Have to say the Amazon Echo (Big or Dot) and Evohome show the way to the future.
Have just been playing with the Echo Groups.
Now have "Upstairs Heating" with all up rads in it.
And "Downstairs Heating" down rads.
And, the best one "Bedrooms" so can say "Alexa, set Bedrooms to 21 degrees"
For all of you with country mansions - you could even have "East Wing" and "West Wing".
Permutations are endless and any single Rad (aka Device) can belong to multiple groups.
{tap} {tap} {tap} to be able to ask what an individual device temp is... Great to argue with the ladies when they say it's too cold :-)
I'm not sure it is lazy programming. Ultimately the guys are having to work within the Alexa SmartHome Skill API. If during the device discovery phase it returned the location prepended to the zone name in the 'friendlyName' field it would mean that every user of the skill would see that behaviour.
If you had to spell out the location as well as the zone name for every Evohome update via Alexa I expect it would annoy more people than it pleases.
I am still struggling with Echo and find that if I limit devices to Evohome and Bose SoundTouch all is OK but add lighting, even with different named rooms, chaos seems to prevail. Plus for some reason around 04:00 a.m. today Echo switched on the BBC News and I had to go to find out what the voices were. Thought it was somebody talking outside. There was nobody and nothing to trigger Echo and I have no settings to switch things on like that. If it can do that then one wonders if there is a risk it may trigger something to come on that you really don't want or could be a danger. I suppose I need to do yet another factory reset to play safe.
I haven't had time to sort mine yet but thinking about it, putting one thing into a group would not work as even though you won't be asking Alexa for it by its original name, it would still exist in the item list so still have the potential to confuse.
This weekend I am going to sit down and rename my existing items and delete in Alexa the things that I don't want or need to pare the list down - I think when I first imported everything there were at least 80 items.
BTW just asked Alexa to add boots to my shopping list and she added poop!
Well the poop could be for the garden. When I first tried out Siri I asked it where a particular part of my anatomy was and it told me it was with a neighbour 2 doors away!
When I added Hue, LightwaveRF and Evohome I had over 200 items listed. I agree creating groups does not cure the problem as the device still exists elsewhere. It is though an Amazon problem and not an Evohome one. Not sure of the answer other than very very careful consideration of what you really want Echo to operate and the names to apply. It would be nice if SmartThings was all embracing so you just loaded that into Echo. By the way I note Evohome still can't be added to SmartThings.
I find all this puzzling ,If you require ALEXA to do something unless she asks you a question you must preface it with "ALEXA" yet there are times when she wakes up seemingly by herself, as we have no close neighbours it cannot be that she heard another voice.
With regard to the BBC News had you used that previous and then told her to STOP, I was playing music told her to stop, some time later she continued playing from where it left off.
I think it has a way to go before she can be taken seriously, perhaps a link to IFTTT, in the mean time it is a bit of fun
Yes, I had been using her to listen to the BBC News but that was at 17:30 the night before and I stopped her at 18:00. She stayed shut up until 04:00 a.m. when on her own she activated the news again. What I would not want her to do is increase the temperature in a room in the early hours of her own volition. The potential to do that seems to be there though. Were someone to instruct her to "switch the iron on" etc. then one sees the risk that could lie ahead if that is the last instructions and she activates it. Not that I would even consider having such a function but I am sure there are some who would. People do some daft things without thinking.
Since writing the above I have checked the log in The Alexa app. It shows that the time I asked her to switch the news on was 17:02 and that I asked her to switch off at 17:55 and she did and remained off until the early hours of the next morning. There is nothing in the log after the switch off command to trigger a switch on. I have reported it to Amazon.
Last edited by G4RHL; 4th December 2016 at 11:00 AM. Reason: Additional info