I trying to setup in RM to activate my (Hue Color)front lights as a normal scene (Feb 2-Nov 19). change scene to Christmas from Nov 20th thru Feb 1. Do I need a button or can I activate the scene? Thank you.
If you're specifically wondering about the "Activate scenes" action in your rule, that will work--it's the same as turning "on" the scene or "push"-ing the scene activator device button (which of the two it calls under the hood, I don't know, but the outcome for the lights should be the same).
But the other question is when that action in your rule will actually run. Note that your ELSE-IF will evaluate to true at any time if the date is between the specified days, which when considered with your triggers will be both sunset-30 and 10:50 PM (unless the IF catches it first, as only one of IF THEN, ELSE-IF, or ELSE will be executed). It's likely that you meant to make this ELSE-IF's condition similar to that if your IF THEN, e.g., something like IF (Time is sunset-30 AND (Between Noember 20 and December 31 OR Between January 1 and February 1)) (I'm not really sure you need to split that last one up, but I haven't tested the case of splitting up a date-based conditional across a year boundary; do note the parentheses that are necessary if the conditions are written in this order).
Finally, note that your ELSE will catch both 10:59 PM on any date outside these dates and sunset-30, but since it looks like you have all the dates covered, this should just leave 10:59 PM, and that should work as you expect--certainly if you test for that again inside this IF, which I'm not sure you need to, though it won't hurt.
Personally, I like to split up rules if I have different triggers and only want a specific portion of the actions to run based on that--then you could get rid of some of the complexity in the conditionals. Simple Automation Rules could even handle at least the "off" portion of this without Rule Machine at all, though a rule that just does that part would also be very simple to write (and would make this one easier to write without checking for the complexity this adds). Just an idea!
Thanks for responding. I made some changes and will see how it goes tonight.
@bertabcd1234 I re-did the RM. Have you seen where there is more than one of the same scene? How do I get rid of them?
Device list:
Summary
I've seen a few reports of similar problems here on the forum (not with RM or scenes in particular, but just duplicate devices showing in lists). My best guess is that it might be a temporary, cache-related problem (I can't remember if anyone ever found a definite reason before). Just giving it time might cause it to fix itself--either a bit of time for the cache to update or either the hourly or nightly maintenance tasks to run. If it sticks around, the worst case is that you could restore from a known-good database backup, but I wouldn't rush to do that if you don't see anything else wrong.
@bertabcd1234. I contacted support and the suggestion was to reach out to the forum. I decided to delete groups and scenes and just created an RM with changing the colors. Thank you for your assistance.
