Motion Lighting Problem

I'm mentioning this just in case someone else has seen something similar and found a cause - I have "fixed" the problem with brute force (I re-wrote the rule and deleted the old one).

I have several motion lighting rules that are nearly identical. They are all for rooms that have one or more lights controlled by a Lutron Dimmer (or Dimmers). Each room has one motion sensor (one is a SmartThings, one is a Sylvania, and two are Eria). The rooms are adjacent to it is easy for me to test whether the rules are working (I can trigger all four by walking in a circle through all four rooms).

Yesterday I noticed the rule for the Living Room didn't seem to be working. I looked at the logs and I could see the Motion sensor for that room going active when I walked in and then going inactive when I left. The light never came on.

I re-booted the hub. Symptoms stayed the same.

I went into the rule to make sure I hadn't done anything to it. I made sure I hit done as I backed out after reviewing everything. No change in the symptoms.

I checked to make sure I could turn the lights on and off using the Pico (these lights are on a Lutron plug-in dimmer). They worked. Still the Motion lighting rule did nothing.

I checked to make sure I could turn the lights on and off using the buttons on the device page. I could. Still the motion lighting rule did nothing (but the motion sensor would go active each time I walked in the room).

I have another rule that turns on the same lights when the front door opens, so I opened the front door. The lights came on. I let them time out, they switched off (per the rule) after the door had been shut for five minutes. I walked in the room - no lights (logs still showed the activity from the motion sensor).

Extremely exasperated, I wrote a new rule that was identical to the old rule except I appended a 2 to the name. I then deleted the original rule and changed the name of the new rule to remove the appended 2, and saved it.

I walked into the living room and the lights went on.

I'm glad it's working but I still can't figure out what the problem was.

The only problem I have experienced with Motion Lighting previously has been when the motion sensor "sticks" in active. The Eria has done that several times. This room has the SmartThings motion sensor and it was not stuck in active.

During all this testing the other three rules worked every time I walked into those areas.

It seems very odd. I feel like I must have overlooked something . . .

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I have been holding off on posting as I haven't really had the time to dig into it but I am having a very similar experience. I have 5 ML rules setup up and they all stopped working. I rebuilt them all and now 4 are working and 1 will not work. I am going to dig in this weekend.

Had the same issue with 1 of my Motion Lighting rules. I did what you did, re-wrote the rule with a different name and deleted the old one and it corrected the issue. I have no issues with the other 7 rules.......you're not alone....

Had some rare down time at work this morning so I dug around. I'm a little reluctant to post this already as I haven't actually tested it, but I'm very confident that my issue was related to "Ghost Rules" left behind. I found them in the "In Use By" section of the motion sensor I am using. I had an epiphany while I was digging this morning and vaguely remembered a thread about it. Partially created “ghost” rules. I had 2 in there from ML and 1 from RM. I've been so busy lately that I'll try to squeeze it in at work and don't get to finish or late night when I'm exhausted. I fell asleep at the keyboard the other night and I'm sure I just closed out in the middle of working on it.

I wasn't thinking of ghosts but I did check the "in use by" for that motion sensor because I was worried I had it involved in some other rule that I had forgotten about - but that was not the case (and no ghost rules either).

I made some progress tonight. I encountered the problem, same as my original description. Notice I said there was another rule that also controlled those lights? That rule includes Capture and Restore logic. I am fairly certain that is my problem. I took that logic out of the other rule. Then activated (by opening the front door) and waited for it to time out (5 minutes). At that point new motion in the living room caused the lights to come on.

I think I need to study how capture and restore should be used.

I feel comfortable that was the source of my problem.

So much for my confidence. I removed the ghost rules and rebuilt it and it worked once and never again. I created several simple lighting rules to get it working for now as the WAF is really low. I don't have any capture and restore logic. Unfortunately, I don't have time to dig.

I'm having this problem and it's ongoing. Meaning I've done the delete and recreate but it comes back. Right now I have a very simple ML rule for my office lights with two sensors. These sensors are only tied to one other rule that only applies on the weekend...and it's not the weekend. In fact I'm currently sitting here in my office in the dark...and I've been triggereing the two sensors in the rule on an off for the last 30 minutes. Here are shots of everything:

mode%20day

As you can see rule ML Office events shows the last event at 7:01 am of the lights being turned ON...yet never off...which I assure you, they did....in fact, still off now. You can see the two motion sensors for this rule have triggered when I can into the office just after 4.

This particular light switch is only in 3 rules, this one, one to turn off all the lights at night time and in google home for voice control.

The light switch is an Inovelli dimmer, but I've had this issue with other brands also.

ML definitely has some bugs. If anyone can help please let me know. I have emailed support but I'm still waiting to hear back from a ticket from May 8th that they haven't gotten back to me on. So I'm thinking I'm not going to hear back anytime soon.

EDIT: So I manually turned ON the lights...then my ML rule started working again. Looks like it missed the off event somehow and was stuck just thinking the lights were still on? but no motion? no idea...but there is a bug in there somewhere.