Feature request: Activate a specific time period before the time period starts

💡 Lighting Room Lighting
1

I'm using RL for just about all the lights in the house, and it works reliably. We're using time periods instead of modes, since we want the lights to follow the same schedule even with the mode is 'Away,'

However, sometimes, it would be useful to trigger the RL to activate a specific time period setting on demand. For example, it may be a particularly cloudy day, and I want to activate the evening light settings an hour early.

If, for example, a text variable changing its value to 'Evening' could be used to select the 'Evening' time period, that would be useful -- I can set up a rule in RM to change the variable and thus trigger the time period change.

2

Ignoring the rest since I can't speak to it: this is one of the reasons I don't use Away mode. It does make some apps act nicer (e.g., Thermostat Scheduler), but I don't have a need for that, either. I basically arm or disarmed HSM intrusion based on presence as well as have a few notifications from events that only get sent when I'm away; but modes don't play a role with any of this. It doesn't make sense for me to conflate presence and what is essentially time of day.

Just one idea if that works for you. :grinning:

2 Likes
3

Yes, I agree that you could use the HSM status instead of mode, but oh, that's a lot of rules to go edit... :frowning:

Even so, there may be other things (rules, and such) that depend on the mode (unrelated to HSM) that I don't want to have affected just because I want to turn the lights on a little early, so after some thought, I'd want the same feature even if my RL were configured based on modes.

4

That reminds me -- sometimes, and it's not often, I wish there were some way to edit apps in a text editor instead of the UI. Very rarely, but more often than 'never'...

1 Like
5

You could always create a RL instance as a scene for a specific time period that you might want to activate early. Create an evening light scene with an Activator device as it’s only means to turn on and off. This way you can have the settings as on demand.

6

Yes, that's essentially what I ended up doing. Not quite as convenient as what I proposed, since I then have to keep two RL instances updated, but good enough for now.