Morning, and sorry for the bother.
I want to control my window blinds every day, during the summer months only (May, June,July,August,September) at intervals of 1 hour starting at 10AM until 5 PM in the afternoon. It will check if the weather says it is sunny or cloudy outside every hour from 10AM-5PM (only during those months). If sunny, it will close certain blinds, if cloudy, it will open blinds. Is there a simple way to do this?
Thank you
Rory Simpson
Simple is relative, but I'd probably look at either Rule Machine or WebCore to implement this logic.
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This is possible with Rule Machine. I do similar scheduling for Time of Use notifications when we start the dryer. Needs updating because I used to rely also on IFTTT and Google Calendars to include holidays for off peak, but the method isn't hard. Just haven't been motivated to update it since until recently our power company has been giving us off-peak rates all day in response to COVID relief.
You can easily integrate light measurement into the condition. That would be much more appropriate than checking weather which is far too local to be an accurate method.
Thank you all for your suggestions. I will try this out, it looks exactly what I want to do.
Yes, light measurement would be a good idea, but what type of device do you need to measure light?
I am using the inovelli 4in1 sensor. I have it inside at the top of a window with a blind that never gets fully raised all the way to minimize internal lights affecting the reading
I first tried the Aeotec Trisensor but on really bright days it would rollover the max lux reading of 31500 or something like that and give me a reading of 400. Made my RM mode controller flip to dusk at 2:30pm.
The Aeotec is supposed to have a register to scale the reading but I was never able to get it to take .... and I really really tried !!!
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I will have to try that, thank you.
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Looking at the rule I posted I realized I cut off the default part that drives it during the summer months
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What did you use for a trigger?
The rule i have shown does not have any trigger defined.
I have another RM that triggers on mode change. I realize that i could split this up into a bunch of simple lighting rules that get triggered on a specific mode, but i am not really concerned about runtime since it only runs six times a day.
This RM runs other RMs
Thank you for the explanation. I am now going to have to look at Run Actions, and how they work. Thank you so much for the help, it is appreciated.
So is Run Function - deck per mode, run another Rule?
Yes “Function - deck per mode” is the title of the rule I previously posted.
I label my RMs “Functions” if they do not have any triggers and only get called from other RMs.
Thank you, appreciate the time you have taken to explain. I never knew you could call a rule within a rule.
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