I’m about to ditch the Room Lighting app and revert to the older Groups and Scenes app. What seems to be the basic capabilities of reliably turning on and off all lights in a room don’t appear to work reliably.
I like the consolidated nature of the Room Lighting app in which I can specify both activation and off rules. But I can’t use it if it doesn’t activate/deactivate my scenes in a reliable manner.
Similar to other reports (for example, Room Lighting: Some lights fail to turn off), some of my room lighting automations don’t turn on all of the lights when the automation is activated.
I’m running Hubitat C-7 v2.3.4.123.
Here’s an example of a room after I manually activated all of the lights to on based on clicking on “Activate”:
Here are the log file entries from a few nights ago when the room was turned off at 23:00 hrs and activated when mode switched to Evening. Several times the Living Room Cove Lights have not been turned on when mode becomes evening.
Some of my other room lighting automations experience similar inconsistencies as a result of activation.
It does not appear that there’s anything amiss based on the log file entries.
I don’t think it will help for me to implement some rules via Rule Machine to take advantage of activator devices given that those rules would still depend on the Room Light app to effect on and off.
I do have a lot of scenes that activate when mode turns to Evening. Probably 30+ lights being turned on with many dimmers being set. I hope that Hubitat doesn’t have an issue dealing with a storm of activations. But I suppose that could be an underlying issue.
You can see from the log that the app is turning every device off, but only turning on 5 of them. It did command all 6 devices. It's Cove Lights that didn't respond. You should check out turning that on to 1 from its device page. Perhaps try a slightly higher level. This failure has nothing to do with Room Lights.
Why does pressing the “Activate” button in Room Lighting appear to work reliably whereas depending on Room Lighting to automatically activate the room does not?
Behind the scenes (no pun intended), does pressing the “Activate” button end up executing the same activation code/logic as when Room Lighting automatically activates a room?
Not quite. Activate ignores conditions, disablement and current light state, while a Means to Activate honors those. Beyond that difference, they do the same thing. Most issues like this stem from devices that have not reported off reliably, leaving the app thinking the light is on. This can be overcome with Activate Lights Options / Additional Options 'Activate even if partially Activated' or 'Command devices irrespective of reported state (Force)'.
You can turn on debug logging to see if devices are reporting when they should. In general, logging will show you what is or is not happening as you expect.
As shown in the screenshot above, I’ve been using those two options in an attempt to get the lights to turn on and be set at the desired levels consistently.
