Room Lights Automation vs Simple Automation Rules

[jbaruch]

Hi folks, I bet it was explained already, but I couldn't find the exact discussion; please point me to it if it exists.

I have two use cases for light automation:

• Mode change (turn off when night and away)
• Motion sensors turn lights in bathrooms, closets, doorways, etc. on when motion and off when motion stops.

I used to do the first one in RM (in mode change trigger), but since I am ending up with a lot of lights, some of them are randomly skipped (not sure why, but that's a different debug discussion), so I decided to give RLA a chance to turn lights off per room when mode changes.

My question is about the second use case. For now, I have a bunch of SARs "turn on on movement, turn off when stopped". I can instead theoretically create a room for each closet/doorway/etc. and automate the act/off there with the motion sensor as the trigger.

It looks like an overkill (a room for each closet?), but maybe it's the right way to go. What do you think?

P.S. Some devices in the room have separate rules (e.g. a fan in a bathroom should be turned on by humidity and/or turned off by a timer, while the lights are triggered by motion), so what do I do? A separate room for the fan?

[tivomaniac]

Lots of small rules are often easier to manage and troubleshoot than one big one.

You don't need special rooms for anything. In fact you don't need to use them at all. Just use the SAR as you are or even RM. Once you get RM down I find it easier to just do most stuff using it as it seems like over time I'll want to expand some other rule beyond what it's app can do and I end up moving to RM anyway.

[jbaruch]

Yeah, that makes sense. I do like the concept of rooms, as it's a proper encapsulation abstraction. Still, I find it not flexible enough (e.g., different means of activation/off for different devices in the room). But again, I might be missing something.