Notify when doors are left open - notification app limitation?

Hi,

I'm looking to have a notification sent to my phone and my google home when any of my doors are left open for more than 2 minutes and those notifications should repeat until all the doors are closed.

I've found a bunch of threads where people are implementing this with rule machine but there are also comments to say to use the Notification app instead as it's simpler.

I've spend the best part of the last hour implementing the settings in the Notification app and testing things out but I think I found some limitations so I'm wondering do I bite the bullet and do it with rule machine or is there something I'm missing? Is there a better way of achieving this?

The limitations that I found are:

  • if multiple doors are left open you only get notifications about one of the doors.
  • if multiple doors are left open and then one of them is closed you no longer get notified about the other doors that are still left open.

For reference these are the settings that I tried.

Thank you very much

The %device% variable will only work for the first device that triggers the notification, I believe.

Rule machine could be used to send a notification with a list of all the doors that are open, which would probably require some more complex variable usage (possible in rule machine but not notifications app).

Or depending on how many doors, you could create multiple instances of the notifier app, one per door. But then youā€™d get multiple notifications, rather than one with all the relevant doors.

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Ok thanks yeah a separate instance of the app per door should do it.

And then if the notifications don't work well in practice I'll look at doing something more complex in rule machine.
At the moment I've just been experimenting with Virtual contact sensors as I haven't yet moved them over from SmartThings

Simple Contact Reminders might be of interest to you.

5 Likes

Have you tried creating a ā€œCustom Monitoring Ruleā€ in Hubitat Safety Monitor? This use case is its bread and butter.

No I hadn't looked at doing it that way yet. I saw some posts of sometime else trying to do something similar with HSM and they were directed away from it, but perhaps it was because of something specific that couldn't be done with HSM that the user was trying to do.

I'll have a look at HSM as well. I've done it a few different ways already but not 100% happy with it

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