Adding garage door contact sensor

💡 Lighting Room Lighting
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Hey guys, I was looking for a little more direction in my quest of diving deeper into Hubitat automations utilizing Room Lighting.

I have added a garage door contact sensor with which I would like to create an automation that turns on the exterior lights to 100 brightness when the contact opens, and then turns the lights back out when it closes. I would like this to happen after my exterior lights have been turned off for the evening at 9pm by my Time of Day lighting automation already in place. Seems simple enough. The problem I am running into is that I would like to do this without messing with my current Time of Day lighting setup that I have already created with Room Lighting.

Specifically, would the best way of doing this be just adding in "contact opens" to the "Means to Activate"? Then "contact closes" for "Means to turn off" in addition to my "Time of day". I ask, because it seems when I start thinking through things, I would then need to then utilize the "activate under these conditions" etc.. I feel like once I did that I was lost in a rabbit whole of what to select in order to not mess up my currect Time of Day lighting.

Since Room Lighting is new, I could not find anything too close to the specifics of my situation in the forums, so I am asking here. Am I going about this the correct way or is there a simpler way of adding in the contact sensor to my current automations without affecting them.

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I have all my stuff except an RM (Legacy, lol) or two, in Simple Automation and haven't been keeping up at all with the new fangled stuff. This seems like it would be very easy to do in Simple Automation.

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To your point Room Lighting is pretty new. I have not used the "lighting period" functionality but it seems like that might be what you want, if you want to use your existing room lighting child app. Otherwise a separate simple or basic rule might be fine - as long as it doesn't interfere with your existing automation.

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Hey thanks for the input here, it helped me realize I shouldn't add to my existing RL instance, but rather create a whole new instance for the same dimmer that is built around the contact sensor. It seems to be working perfectly. I am not sure if this is how I am supposed to do it, but it works:)

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There are often many ways to accomplish the same thing, so I always go by the adage "if it works, that IS how I am supposed to do it" :slight_smile:

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