Motion Lighting acting "funny"

🛎️ Get Help
1
I apologize in advance for this post not including a lot of detailed diagnostic information. I am SO frustrated. My system has been stable for months. I had made no changes. Last change was in August when I added a motion sensor. I have four Motion Lighting rules that are the "backbone" of my automation. They control lights in my Main Hall, Living Room, Dining Room, and Kitchen. They are very simple and all written almost identically. Yesterday I noticed some of the rooms were not being switched off after the 5 minute delay. After many false starts I finally turned on logging on the app and found it was reporting not turning off because it thought they were already off. One of the things I did was installing the 2.1.5.123 update (I had been on 2.1.4.130 since August 28) - I figured if I had to contact Bobby he would want me on the latest release. That didn't seem to change the symptoms. I tried multiple methods of turning the lights off and on and finally found that doing it from one of my dashboards seemed to clear the issue. With that I went to bed. This morning I got up to feed the dogs and, when I went into the kitchen - no lights, after opening the dog food in the dark and feeding the dogs, I sat down to look at logs. The logs were reporting that it was not turning the lights on because they were already on. I was at wits end. I have to fly out tomorrow and the most important rules are all wonky. I have now deleted the "Don't turn off if already on" setting from all the rules. Now I understand some of the "ranting" posts I see where people are threatening to throw this thing out the window. Thank heavens the Lutron dimmers and Picos all work.
2

Are the lights your talking about Z-Wave switches or Zigbee bulbs? If Z-Wave are they Z-Wave Plus or not and in not do you have polling setup on those switches? Everyonce in a while I have had to pull the air gap switch on one of my GE Z-Wave (non plus) switches to get it to work correctly again and it is one of the two I have polling setup on as well and I had to stop polling yesterday and restart it since the polling had failed enough times in a row to not poll very frequently which I think was caused by adding some Z-Wave repeaters and rebuilding the Z-Wave network. I haven't really had much trouble with Zigbee compared to the old Z-Wave (non plus) devices.

3

No, they are all Lutron Dimmers with a Lutron Pro Hub. They've been in place for months and working darn near flawlessly. Until yesterday.

And they continued to work. I was able to turn the lights on and off using the dimmers and the Picos that are linked to them (not through Hubitat). I could turn the lights on and off using the device page for those lights as well. It seemed to only be the Motion Lighting rules that were confused.

4

Ill add a "me too" here. I ended up turning off "Don't turn off if already on" as well. Also I read something about having to include the switch in "switches to turn off lights" or else it won't know what state its in? They say they dont want to over-complicate ML, lol it is already.

5

I guess there was some problem lurking there that I had never encountered before. Bruce's notes indicate he fixed something that sounded like it was related. It was when I saw that note that I decided to apply the new update. Of course, that just added a new set of unknowns. I should know better but I was really in a panic.

6

Best thing to do if something like this creates an unexpected problem, is to roll back to the previous release.

There were changes made to Motion Lighting so that it is better aware of the states of the lights. What specifically happened in your case isn't possible to tell without seeing the logs, and showing the ML setup page. Also, since yours are all similar, a description of what you are wanting to happen would help. Some of the previous work-arounds that were used aren't needed anymore. But, you're right, this is a complicated app, and there are so many subtleties that can trip you up.

I'm very sorry for the confusion and frustration. I use Motion Lighting throughout my house, and I know how important it is for it to always work right.

7

Thanks, Bruce.

I was in such a panic I didn't proceed with my usual patient, thorough trouble shooting :grinning:

It seems that removing "Don't turn off if already on" has it working well enough that I can leave my house-sitter here without fearing technical support phone calls.

I didn't roll back because I saw the initial symptoms on 2.1.4.130. I don't think 2.1.5.123 made much of a difference, from what I could see . . .

8

i found this today also - Don't turn off if already on seemed to be enabled on its own but only one one of my apps - but there is a chance I did it by accident

Tho i haven't changed this particular motion lighting automation in weeks. I disabled that toggle and it is working now fine.