Sure, we’re all here because we’re interested in automating the lights and other elements of our environments. But not maintaining some level of manual control when needed is more than I’m willing to bite off (not to mention my wife).
What will you do when your hub dies? Sit in the dark until a new one arrives in the mail? You can open your blinds/curtains manually I hope or maybe unlock your own door and go outside if you remember how to turn the knob.
Edit: Next thought... what do you do if you decide to move? That is something we all think about in planning is whether we leave our switches and buy new or pull them and put the "dumb" switches back..... If you have no switches... I hope you didn't seal over the gang boxes.
There are lots of ways you can still change state when the power is out...
When the power comes back on every GE Link and Cree Bulb will turn on automatically, users will walk into rooms and turn on/off the switch forgetting that the power is out, a lot of garage doors have some type of override that allow you to manually operate them when there's no power. I don't have a c-wire so my thermostat runs on AA batteries, although changing it when the power's out wouldn't accomplish anything...
In the US mark that as ALL garage door openers have a manual override.
It’s available in RM, has been for a while too. I have a rule that turns off a switch, waits 60 seconds, and turns it back on on hub restart because my Watercop loses connection on restarts.
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But what YOU want makes no logical sense in the scheme of automation. My houses need to function whether I’m there ( or any human ) regardless. That’s the point of automation. Not home at 10pm ( or for all weekend, or a month ) you want the home to look lived in, be a certain temp, alarm set, cats locked in the basement, fish tank light on or off, hamster tucked in.
Those tasks need to run, I’m extremely confused by your though process as to what automation is. If you’re relying on automation ( yet want to intervene ) because you think you need to then automation is not for you, what you seem to want is a connected home, but not an automated home. You want a gizmo house, I want a house without wall switches, visible thermostats, my hot tub warm and my beer cold and my wine chilled. We are not totally there yet, but marching forward with great products like Hubitat and smart persons to make apps to free us from the stuff we just don’t need to worry about.
If you purchase a self driving car, are you going to grab the wheel at random times in effect wasting your money as you just need a manual car, or are you going to 100% be all in - and trust the car to operate as designed and do the risk calculations for you. The whole idea of automation is to eliminate ( or turn over ) repetitive tasks to a system that now does those tasks. If we automate, but have to manually intervene at every power failure or reboot that kinda negates the whole automation benefit. Automation is a nicety not a necessity, sure it has some energy benefits but it’s strictly a tool of convenience.
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So I could create a RM rule that says: on boot, go around every device and check its in the right state based on the time of day and other conditions? fantastic. But I really shouldn't have to. HE should just do it by default. im yet to be convinced of an argument against it coming back in the expected state after a power outage.
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My garage door has battery backup, works for about 50 cycles on battery.
Ok? Your point is? Quote what you are replying to in order for me to understand.
The earlier point is that even with the power being out that device "states" CAN change and often times do. So with your example of your garage door opener having a battery the door can open/close during the power outage, but your Hubitat hub does not know this. So when the power comes back things are potentially "out of sync".
I think what @jon1 is looking for is that upon power restore that Hubitat should be able to "get in sync". Maybe not run rules from 30 minutes ago that were "missed" during the outage but at the very least know what time it is and if it's now "night time" change the mode correctly.
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Unfortunately for a lot of devices that's just not possible and it has nothing to do with the platform...
Hubitat could request the state from every device after it turns on, but z-wave devices that sleep won't respond so there's no way to get their state until the next time they wake up which could be 12 hours or more.
Agreed with battery devices. However I don't think that's a concern of "the past" as a battery device once power is restored to the hub already has updated state when that state changes. That state is at the hub level only. I don't think anyone wants a flood of motion events hitting their system of on/off, on/off for the last 3 hours the lights would be like poltergeist!!!! 
However there are certain things that should be "within reason" which other systems do have and utilize to bring the system to a "current state".
- Power up
- Do I have any time based rules?
- Do they fall within a threshold of -X minutes/hours from NOW
- If yes run those rules
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Regarding the issue of the hub not going into evening mode when power was restored yesterday, it also didnt go into evening mode today. Before the outage, it worked fine with no changes to MM in the meantime. Im guessing this is due to the continuing bug about sunset with offset which previously apparently didnt affect my MM setup, but for some reason now does.
Ive now set it to just sunset with no offset. Does anyone know if thats enough to work around the bug? Or does sunset have to be out of it completely and just put a fixed time for now?
im still dubious if MM would have selected the correct mode on system start after the outage when using sunset or a fixed time as the trigger in the event the hub is started after sunset.
Automated Home for me, please.
I do not use Mode.
Motion and Contacts drive the Automation(s). Wall switches are all functional, and Guests, will often reach for them. My wish is that their hands never get there.. that the automation gets there first.
I have two exceptions, because I'm waiting for an adequate solution. First is fans and the lights within. I have controllers in them that give me remote control and I was finger poised above the Buy button for the Hampton Bay when the Lutron announcement arrived. I hope those will be the solution for me.
Second is bedrooms. Naps and Illness are the hesitation here. I don't want lights to disturb them (especially me) if they're sick, asleep, and it just happens to be the time range that motion turns on the lights, bright. I need a Bed-is-Occupied sensor to solve this, and I have some ideas, but no time to develop it.
So, I tried to imagine a power fail, that starts in the day, when lights would be off anyway, then returns well into night. What would my hub do. First, I'm not sure it would have accurate time. I'm positive it will finish booting well before my local Time Server does. Probably wouldn't have an address, since DHCP would not be ready yet. My imagination says the hub would be lost at this point and wouldn't recover when Time and DHCP did become available.
But let's imagine it does recover. It has the correct time, it's found all the devices, and as people move around the house, it would operate properly, I believe. In other words, I'm time sensitive, not mode sensitive. As long as the Hub has the correct time, and all the Motion and contact sensors are found, followed of course by the switches and outlets, my automation should work after any length of power outage.
I suspect it wouldn't because of DHCP and Time, but I can't remember what happened last power outage with the Hub. Sadly, I am tied to boot order on power recovery.
I agree that you wouldn't want a backlog of events, but without knowing the current state of those devices it's impossible to make all automations continue flawlessly after a power outage.
If a water sensor changes to wet when the power is out and it's still wet when the hub turns on, the hub has no way of knowing it's wet so it won't perform any of the actions it should have.
If that night you change the mode to night and you have a rule that's supposed to notify you if any water sensors are wet when the mode changes to night, it still won't notify you because the last event reported to the hub was dry. When a device is wet it should send periodic wet notifications, but a lot of devices don't.
If you have a rule that turns off a light at 8pm if there's no motion in the driveway and the power went out while that motion sensor was active the hub will still think there's motion in the driveway when it turns back on. If that sensor doesn't generate any new events before 8pm the light won't turn off at 8pm because the hub still thinks it's active.
After a power loss I wouldn't want the house to attempt to resync missed rules based on the current state of my house because the hub has no way of reliably determining the current state of all my devices.
@krlaframboise, I completely agree and I quoted specifically to highlight all of your items involve sensors.
When the power comes back up there are several things I want managed and taken care of. At the very least I want any rules that have a condition on "night mode" to be able to run but they won't because the hub is still in day mode and will be until the following night without intervention.
I don't understand as I use several other systems and they all have this functionality.
But as I've said before I use other systems so I don't have a dog in this fight I'm just an observer.
Again, anyone who’s used SmartThings for any amount of time has had an experience that would be very similar to what would happen in this scenario. It ain’t pretty.
The whole concept is stupid. Let’s assume for a moment the power has been out for 2 full days due to a storm (it’s happened before). I sure as hell do not want my hub trying to replay 2 days worth of automations to catch up, nor would I want it to try to “guess” what state the system should be in now.
Even more-so, I really do not want to see any development effort expended into a problem that can be solved right now with a simple $50 battery backup.
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It sound like you can do this today using the system start event that chuck mentioned. It is something I am definitely going to look at too.. However there’s a flaw in that plan, and the same reason why the OP’s desire to have the system try to set the correct state will not work..
I use modes a lot. Modes are triggered by presence (ST App & Life360). Those are both cloud events and if the hub is down when they come in, no amount of intelligence in the hub will be able to figure out what mode the system should be in without that presence feedback.
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My point is that Hubitat allows you to setup complex rules that use devices so I'm sure a lot of people have rules that set the mode based on the state of their devices and having Hubitat attempt to figure out the mode after power is restored could make things much worse for them.
Same here, I have a battery backup.
I couldn't agree more.
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You and I have a minimum of 3 hubs, so we'd need one per. 
Or a lot bigger battery 
j/k
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I think for sanity a definition from the OP of "state" and to what degree is needed to go further otherwise I feel like the conversation can spin in circles?
I agree when a mode is set by an external factor that's hard to be able to set. A capability is to on power up have a poll to Life360 to get the current state. That would be a function of the power up state check. This would all be very specific to each user and scenario.
