I’ve recently made some changes and basically set up room lighting to turn on my bedroom lights based on motion sensor, and turn off after a minute of inactivity, but disable turning off if a variable is set. Separate in rule machine I have if the sensor is triggered after 9pm then set the variable
Then I read in bed, whatever, and eventually turn off the lights to sleep
Minimal testing but seems to be working. But I noticed in apps page it shows the room lighting as “active (off disabled)”. Off disabled marked sense, but is it totally fine for the room to be “active” for like 8 hours or is that totally fine?
In all of my motion apps I have a disable turning off virtual switch for when there is a party or when the cleaning people come. When those events are over the lights are turned off outside of the motion app. By default the motion apps don't know the lights are off since the lights were controlled outside of the app. The result is the motion app needs to go through an entire trigger via motion (but the lights won't come on because the app thinks they're already on)/end after inactivity cycle before things get back into sync.
The cleanest way to handle that situation is to set 'Switches that Determine All Lights Are Off' to include the lights you are controlling. When the rule is re-enabled the motion app will be in the off state and ready to go on the first motion cycle.
Its not hurting anything, it is just a "state" of the RL app, it is not like it is running in a loop consuming resources the entire time. The RL setup for my kitchen runs from around 6am to 9pm every single day and adjusts the brightness throughout the day. That room is sort of dark and right next to my office without lights so I keep them on all the time when home.
There are possibly some things you could do however, so that it properly shuts down the RL when you do turn all the lights off. Sometimes if it stays in the Active state it can cause issues when trying to re-activate it again via motion depending on how you have it all setup.
