Newbie - dimmer to follow anothers state

[AussieDave]

I'm very new to Hubitat but loving the capability so far.
I have a Theater Room with 2 x dimmers, one for the down lights and one for the main light.
I would like to automate so that when the down lights are set above 80% then the main light turns on, likewise as the down lights are set below 80% the main light turns off.
I've tried working through basic rules but can't see a way to get it to work and I've tried Rule Machine with what i think would work but nothing is happening with the main light.

[ogiewon]

Welcome to Hubitat!

It might be easiest to break this up into two separate Rule Machine rules for now.

Here is an example that I just created to get you started. The following rule will be triggered by my "Office Lamp" having a dimmer level above 80%. The Required Expression will only allow the actions of this rule to run if the "Office Overhead" light is "Off". If both conditions are met, then the "Office Overhead" light is turned on.

You could then create a second rule that reverses the logic to handle turning off the light when the level of your dimmer drops <= to 80.

Note: I have not fully tested this rule, so some tweaks may be required to get the desired behavior under all circumstances.

[anon47916022]

Can also be done in Room Lighting.

[AussieDave]

Thanks for the speedy pointers, I think I am making some progress when I get the time to tinker.

Trying to use Rule Machine I couldn't get any activity so tried room lighting and am now getting a little further, I can get the main light to turn on as expected but it still doesn't turn off when the dimmers are turned off and I'm not too sure why.

One train of thought is the main light itself as it's not a switch but another dimmer, so I tried tweaking the Room Lighting hint above to (ON = level 100% and OFF = Level 0%) but end up with the issue where it just doesn't turn off.

I did notice a bit of an issue where sometimes the rule worked and other times it didn't, I'm sorta putting that down to me not waiting long enough between changing states for now but is it common to have inconsistency issues with rules?

My next thought is to maybe create a virtual switch if that's possible where setting the virtual switch on sets the dimmer to fully on and turning the switch off turns the dimmer off and use that as the output, does this seem like a good way forward or could I be missing something simple?

Thanks again for your speedy replies

[anon47916022]

@AussieDave

could I be missing something simple?

Maybe not simple per se, but this should be an easy fix. It was something I didn't think about with my recommendation.

When a dimmer is just turned off, the 'level' value does not change. So just using the level would result in what you are seeing. If you dim the down lights, then the level will change and turn off the other. If you just turn the down lights off, the level doesn't change so your other light doesn't turn off.

The easy fix, add an additional 'means to turn off' for the down light switches being turned off.

[AussieDave]

@anon47916022 Gotcha, thanks so much. That makes sense, that also explains why I was getting what seemed like intermittent activation's before when I would turn the lights on opposed to turning the dimmer up.

There's always another problem

The lights now turn off when the dimmer is turned off which is great, however I have the same issue when turning them on I.E. if i turn the down lights on to >80% then the main light doesn't recognize the change, so using the same logic as you suggested I set another means to activate as the down lights are turned "on", which is great however now if i turn on the down lights to a lever <80% then the main light turns on (even though the down lights are <80%).

I tried using "Limit Activation under these conditions" and set a level of >80% which sort of works to start with, when the dimmers are turned on to a low lever the main light turns on and then straight off again but then setting the dimmer to >80% does not work.

I thought about using "disable Activation upon these Events" to set a level <80% but there is no advanced/level option there.

Finally, I tried "Limit activation under these conditions and set a level of <80%, which on first activation seemed a little odd (turned dimmers on to <80% and the main light turned on for a few seconds and then turned off again) but all testing after then worked as desired.

Thanks for all the pointers, I would never have guessed about the level not actually changing when you turn the lights off