Have what I think people will say is a philosophical question but would like the opinion of the community.
In ST, I used to set the mode to 'Keep' and have all of my rules not fire if the mode was set this way. That way I could turn my lights on/off for a party and not have to worry about they system getting confused about a non-standard set of activities. Basically allowed me to suspend the system until I changed the mode back to a standard one.
I noticed when using the simple automations that Restrictions effectively has that with a switch and so that seems like the more standard way to implement this and is built into the system. I assume people will say use this instead of my old mode method?
I also noticed however that I am an idiot and have managed to mess up each one of my rules and/or managed to accidentally flip this switch causing my rules to not work as expected. Chalking this up to newness but also wondering if people have any thoughts around mode and switches to pause automations.
i have both depending on situation, i have a mode 'off' which no automations run, but at room/device level i aslo have kill switchs.
ie bathroom override switch which stops my humidity/fan automation from running (when having a bath the fan is noisy)
or when the TV is on it stops my lighting automation running in that room
Thanks Mark. Sounds like my mode “Keep On” is like yours and a reasonable use case. Now I just need to think about how I switch modes.
When ST started acting up, I started using mode switching way too often. I’d like to get back to a more limited use case but that means I need to think about how to do it and change my thinking.
I see modes as a whole house switch, so if you have something like a party it makes sense to me that this could be represented using a different mode. Modes are also mutually exclusive, i.e. you are only ever in one mode and so have to explicitly define how the house should behave in each mode, even if that's the same as another mode.
I would therefore see switches as more useful for fine-grained control such as room level changes in behaviour. The kinds of things I plan to implement are room based modes, allowing some rooms to "wake-up" before others. I will look at some of the community apps for this first, but may revert back to switches if the apps don't suit my use case.
I don't use modes at all. I can't think of enough actions I'd want to lump together to make a mode worth while. I use virtual switches to implement mini-modes.
