I deserve to be given the cold shoulder

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Oh dear. Approval Factor is down the pan.

I got some temp sensors to set up alarms if the fridge or freezer get too warm.
After a few readings that were obviously a bit "out" a train of thought ensued...

  1. Find something to compare them against & then implement an off-set.
  2. Off-sets are more accurate when done at the target temperature.

So I confidently set forth and grabbed a Philips Hue motion/temp sensor, placed it inside the fridge alongside the other sensor and sat back waiting for some comparison data.
This data ALSO seemed to be out of whack. Not by much, but enough to potentially affect a fridge keeping the contents properly cold.

So again, I confidently set forth and placed a cabled food probe (which I KNOW is calibrated) in the fridge and, once more, sat back. The problem with this is that people keep opening the damned fridge so I had to keep waiting until it had been left closed for a while...

AND THEN I GOT SIDE-TRACKED!

Wind forward a couple of days & my better half asks why the kitchen lights keep turning off. We've been down this road with motion sensors before, but I was quickly told that "waving my arms around makes no bloody difference!"

It was only then that I remembered. It wasn't a SPARE Philips Hue sensor that went in the fridge. The lights switch on when the kitchen door is opened, but rely on the movement sensor to STAY on.

I explained what had happened which was met with a peculiar expression that can only be translated as "for the love of god!"
Unfortunately, and at the worst possible moment, my "man brain" then took complete control of my mouth. "You could have opened the fridge to turn the lights back on."

So, I've invented the world's biggest light switch and earned myself several thousand negative Brownie points along with the (hopefully veiled) threat of "hoping the sofa is comfortable."

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I feel that we may need to create a new badge, @bobbyD. This does appear to go well above and beyond, and in an extremely creative way, to obliterate WAF completely through operator error.

I'm just plain impressed. :wink:

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PS: Normal service has been resumed. I thought it best - before my head got repeatedly slammed in the fridge door! Just three more freezer sensors to go, but I'll be skipping the "grab a handy Hue" step.

My OH must be getting desensitised. This was nowhere near as bad as the last civil unrest, AKA "The bathroom lights keep switching off while I'm the shower." I came close to being banished to the garden shed that time.

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We were waiting for you out there, dude. A bit cold, and a little crowded, but we missed you. :wink:

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:point_up: this :cold_face: :cold_face::cold_face::cold_face:

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Not as bad as " Beware of the Doghouse" is it?

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It's funny, I narrowly missed such banishment last night.

I was messing with lighting automations yesterday evening, using Rule 5.1 (new to me), and inserted some Required Conditions.

Unfortunately, despite the fact that everything seemed to be working fine prior to bed, sometime in the night I woke up to all the bedroom lights being on. Groggily thinking "huh?", I hit the button to turn them off again, and was rewarded by glorious darkness. Sometime shortly thereafter, I was awoken by the lights again...WTF? Hit the button to turn them off, and they obliged. For 1 second. Then BAM! more bright lights -- are the Aliens here? What's going on?

It was then, at 2 AM in the morning that I realized that I had a misdesigned rule. Arrghhh!

HOWEVER, I too managed to avert the dreaded WAF Apocolypse and subsequent "doghousing" -- by the simple fact that my Mrs slept right through it! <whew!> Note to self: MUST be fixed prior to bedtime tonight!

LOL -- glad you made it through Chris!

S.

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Perhaps we need to be designing better dog houses? :grinning_face_with_smiling_eyes:

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My 81 year old mom was staying with us for Thanksgiving. In addition to automation I do allow remote control via Alexa. As you know when your echo is assigned to an Alexa room and you say "alexa, turn on the lights" she turns on the lights in that room only. My mom got used to that, and at 4am she decided to get up early and go downstairs to the sun room. She said "Alexa, turn on the lights." Unfortunately the Alexa that picked her up was NOT assigned to a room and Alexa graciously turned on EVERY LIGHT IN THE HOUSE.

Now all Alexas are assigned to a room, even if it's a "dummy room." On the plus side my mom stays in the guest room until we're all up :slight_smile:

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Perhaps the "dog-house room"?

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Maybe that was what was turning the lights on and off in the Youtube clip....

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She's back here for Mother's Day... we'll see how it goes :slight_smile:

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Also as a side note i recommend one of the newer forehead temp devices to get an accurate temp .
They all have a surface mode setting as well as body temp. They tend to be pretty accurate.

https://www.amazon.com/Thermometer-No-Touch-Forehead-Accurate-Readings/dp/B093F6HS45/ref=mp_s_a_1_2_sspa?

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Weirdly and perhaps ironically... the video (from a similar product) shows it being used by a bloke to measure the temperature of food when cooking, like he's treating cooking like a job he does in the shed... :slight_smile:

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Also.i have extra back up rules for when i fff up. Pretty funny. I actually have light off rules for certain lights that if time is between 2 am and sunrise and they turn on... they immediately turn back off. They were originally for hue lights that were misbehaving and turning on after power glitches/ surges/ Outages. But they work for backup waf when u screw up rules.

It is humorous when i am up.in the middle of the night for something and try to turn the lights ON and swearing when they turn back off and i have forgotten about the rule.

Now i need to code a workound rule for alexa announcing in the middle of the night that the kitchen freezer has died when it gets a bogus temp reading of 8 million degrees

Maybe the new sticky feature can be added to the simple notifier rules.

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Awesome. This is why I avoid voice notifications...nothing like getting woken up by a voice notification in the middle of the night due to a dead battery or bogus reading...lol

S.

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Knowing us, and the things we do, this is probably our only hope. :wink:

A while back I was messing around w/an automation that would run if a door opened in the middle of the night when it shouldn't. The automation turned on every light in the house, and made the lights on each side of our bed flash several times. Ran from 2AM until 6:30 AM, just in case I was up late or early and opened a door for some reason. Wanted to be really sure the automation would never run accidentally, which would not be good...little did I know how "not good" that would be. :slight_smile:

To make it easy to test in the bedroom (to see the flashing lights!) I initially included a motion sensor next to our bed in the triggers. Waved hand at motion sensor and worked perfectly the first time!! All lights on, bedside lights flashing. (Promoted myself to Genius, First Class.) Went back out to the family room to remove the motion sensor from the triggers.

At this point things get a bit cloudy and uncertain... Either I was kidnapped by aliens and mind-wiped (seems like the most likely explanation), or I may have been distracted by a small bit of fuzz on my sweater. Regardless, there was a loss of continuity and the motion sensor did not get removed from the triggers.

So sometime after 2AM when one of us rolled over in bed, or the dogs repositioned themselves, or a fly buzzed by, the bedroom lit up like a bowling alley and our beside lights flashed angrily. Dogs, confused/excited by the sudden change jumped up and start barking frantically. Wife (jumping to conclusions) yells at me "What have you done this time!!" and "Turn of those stupid lights immediately!"

I say (digging the hole even deeper) "A door must be open, it's an alarm I set up!" Now my wife is fully awake, somewhat panicked, dogs are continuing to bark madly and race around the bedroom. I head out to check the doors. Wife and dogs follow me, we check every door and window, turn on all outside lights and look outside, but things are clear. I apologize to wife, and assure her that it was a minor glitch, one of the contact sensors must have had a tiny little problem, but it's fine now. To convince her, I turn off all the lights and they stay off. We're good.

We all head back to the bedroom. Of course as soon as we walk near the bed the automation goes off again, all lights come on, bedside lights flash, dogs go crazy...it's like "Madhouse, the Sequel." Amazingly I still have no idea what's going on, why this is happening, but I do at least finally realize I have to disable the automation or we aren't going to get any sleep and I'm going to lose a wife. We go to bed w/her muttering seriously about me removing all home automation devices in the morning.

Of course in the AM I look at the automation and realize what I've done. I am formally banned from ANY overnight alarms or warnings, and receive "that look" when I suggest that the whole event is kind of funny now...

Many, many months later we were w/friends and I told them "a funny story" about my home automation and she did smile a little. But just a little... :wink:

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See now.if you were newlyweds instead of old farts you could have "taken advantage" of being both woken in the middle of the night"!

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Tell her if she doesn't like it that she can program the automations! :rofl:

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