Lighting rule not working as expected

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1

The premise is I want lights to turn on upon motion, stay on at the brighter setting for 5 mins, and upon no motion AND if another switch being off, dim to a lower level and stay at that level until motion is detected again. Since motion lighting doesn't have this feature set, I opted to RM. I have the below rule set up, but the lights are still dimming even if the other switch is on. Please help

tempsnip
tempsnip648×537 71 KB

2

One problem I see off the bat is that right now, your lights are going to get dimmed to 65 or 24% (depending on mode) any time the motion sensor reports active or inactive events (that's what the "changed" trigger entails). It sounds like maybe you just want that on active. Keeping your trigger, you could then re-do the rule action structure to look more like:

IF (Motion active) THEN
  Dimmers per mode: 
      ....
ELSE
   IF (Mode is Evening) THEN
      ...
END-IF

But I don't think that's causing what you describe. Another problem is that you (correctly) chose "cancelable"" on those delayed "Dim" actions, but nothing here actually cancels. You undoubtedly want that to happen when motion reports "active" again. This is probably why you see the lights dimming or turning off even when that second switch is on. To address this, you need the "Cancel Delayed Actions" action. So now it would be more like:

IF (Motion active) THEN
  Cancel Delayed Actions
  Dimmers per mode: 
      ....
ELSE
   IF (Mode is Evening) THEN
      ...
END-IF

Finally, at the moment you took this screenshot, that second switch (the one whose name is blacked out) is reported as not being on, so that would also explain things, but I'm assuming you verified that the state was getting reported correctly and just happened to take this screenshot at another time.

I'd start by seeing if any of that helps. You could also re-write this rule in ways that might be a bit simpler (the "new" paradigm staff have recommended where "Motion active" is the trigger and the actions use waits instead of delays), but there's no reason this couldn't work, too.

1 Like
3

Thank you so much! I will try out your recommendations and let you know how it goes

4

You might look at the Lights On Motion Plus community app. I am very happy with it. It looks like that app could do everything you are currently doing in that rule.

I think the author was too modest to not suggest this option.