I just ran into a situation that I hadn’t considered and my solution was less than ideal. Was curious if there were other outlier events people have planned for that I should think about.
In the past I had a mode called “Automations Off” that I created in the early days of Smartthings when I was testing it and carried over here. I really wasn’t using it that way on Hubitat and at best haphazardly so it didn’t help me last night.
In the Bay Area, the weather is mild and so when a high wind warning came, I didn’t really thing about it. That is until 3am when all my backyard lights came on. Hmm. Press the button for this situation, shut them all off and go back to sleep. Lights out. Thankfully/smugly I thought, getting them all off of z-wave over the weekend paid off. Instantaneous response. Love it.
Pop. All the lights back on. Grrr. Press button again. Pop, lights back on. WTF is going on. Uh how about there is a practical hurricane outside. Can’t flip the mode to turn them off either. Don’t really want to shut the hub down. Flip all motion rules to pause. At 3am. I missed some. Annoying.
I have since created a high wind mode to turn off all external motion rules. Need to implement a true automations off mode.
Any there any other modes people are using that I should do in advance?
I would love one for power outages to drop my power load on my whole house generator so I didn’t have to go around unplugging power vampires but most of my outlets are not smart so don’t have that one yet.
I personally use a virtual switch for situations like this. In Simple Automation you can setup a restriction to not fire if a switch is on or off which would prevent automations you may have in place to turn these outdoor lights on. Then you could setup one to turn things off if this virtual switch turns on too.
I keep my modes simple (day, night, away, cleaning) and use virtual switches for one offs like this. Here is a recent thread which may give you other ideas:
I tend to agree with @ritchierich. I only have modes for Day, Night, Evening and Away, essentially representing various modes that the whole house is in and to which automations can respond, regardless of the fact the automations may only impact a small part of the house. As the extension to that philosophy, deviations from use of modes are handled by virtual switches for individual rooms or situations that I want to handle.
In your example(s) the impact of the "hurricane" appears to primarily impact outdoor areas, with your indoor areas impacted in a limited way (apologies if I have downplayed this...). Introducing another mode would mean lighting and other rules across the house would need to account for another mode, if they have any "per-mode" options, whereas the introduction of a virtual switch can be introduced only where necessary without the need for widespread changes to rules or accounting for this in any future rules that require per-mode options.
All that said... If I / we have completely missed the mark and the weather events do have a significant impact across the whole house, then a mode (I feel) is entirely relevant.
Late Night (after midnight, until Early Morning kicks in).
I have decided to not use an Away mode. I have some automations which I want to have kick in based on Day/Evening/etc. mode when I'm home, others I want to kick in based on mode when I'm away, and still others that I want to kick in when I'm either home or away. Instead, I have a rule which sets a "Home" presence sensor, based on my wife's and my presence sensors. If we're both home, then "Home" is present, if we're not, then it's not present, and various automations act accordingly.
At some point, I will likely also add some vacation rules, but will probably activate/deactivate them using a switch.
