I have a Simple Lighting rule that turns on a light when a door is opened. Then it turns the light off after 5 minutes when the door is closed. It has a restriction to only work at night.
If the door is opened and it is night, light on. But if the the night time goes off before the timeout on the light off the light never goes back off.
Is that the way it's supposed to work? It's no big problem, we just turn the light off manually and it's very infrequent when it happens. Just wondering about it is all.
I have found that is how restrictions work. simple lighting will not do anything if it is in a restricted state. For all of my restrictions, I have a rule in RM to turn on/off a light to the stat I want it in when a restriction occurs.
Indeed, restrictions are quite naive, and that is how they work. This confusion is part of the reasoning for why they are removed from (newer releases of) Rule 4.0--the other part being that Rule Machine can handle everything they did plus more with conditionals, something Simple Lighting doesn't have available.
So, one alternative would be to create a rule. However, Motion Lighting is much more powerful than Simple Lighting, and despite the name, I'm pretty sure contact sensors were just added as an option. It's not in the documentation yet, and I've never tried it, so I'm not exactly sure how it works, but you might want to give it a shot before you turn to RM (or deal with turning it off manually). The "Restrictions" section will be the same as in Simple Lighting, so I'd avoid that (or keep doing what you're already doing), but what you can do is look for other options that might help you achieve the same result (e.g., "switches to disable turning on" will not turn on the light when that switch is on; I have all my modes synced to virtual switch states, so this would work for me, but YMMV).
I looked at the Motion Lighting and didn't see an option for using a contact to turn on the light. So not sure it is there yet.
I can do it with RM, but the Simple Lighting is so much faster.
No matter. The issue doesn't happen that often so it's not that big a deal. In fact I wouldn't have even thought of it except it happened this morning. I just noticed the light was still on. When I get up in the morning about the first thing done is let the dog out the back door. That turns the back outside light on. And I apparently let him out a couple minutes before the night time decided it was day time.
I would recommend making the time a condition of the light coming on rather than a restriction in your rule. That way, it will not prevent the entire rule from running, only the lights coming on. You don't mention if this is a RM 4.0 or 3.0 rule. Its quite easy to add an extra condition in RM 4.0 and in 3.0 you could at it as a condition within the action for True.
When I had it as a RM I did have the nighttime as a condition. The problem was , it would take around 3-5 seconds for the light to come on when the door was opened. With Simple Lighting it is almost instantaneous. I would rather have to turn the light off manually in that rare instance than have the on delay.
I've noticed RM being slow quite often. I did quite a bit of testing on this issue and it was very consistent. And I have other rules that run slow.
Another example. I have a rule to monitor mode change. This morning when the mode changed to home the rule disarms hsm. According to logs and events it took 6 seconds after the mode change to disarm hsm.
What else were you executing at the time. The hub has only limited resources. Whether you're doing something from RM or a custom app, it's going to take what it's going to take. But comparing a routine to execute a whole bunch of functions and a simple lighting app when nothing else is happening is kind of like compare apples and oranges. It's not a fair comparison. I use RM for all my motion and simple lighting and they all execute almost instantly.
That's not exactly what I meant. I had a simple rule in RM that all it did was turn on the light when the door was opened with a condition if it was night time. Then a delay to turn off. Nothing else in that rule. So it and the Simple Lighting was essentially the same. I used the rule for some time before even trying the Simple Lighting. And the rule was consistently slow.
I'm not complaining or whatever you call it. I realize it is what it is, but my point was RM is slow. None of my rules are overly complicated. Probably the longest one only has about 4 functions. I tried to use smaller and more rules just to make it easier for me to understand.
At this point I don't have any apps that aren't from HE's approved or built in list. I have Echo Speaks but have it disabled for now as I had too many problems with it. So I don't know why my rule executions should be so slow, but it's pretty consistent.
I guess what I can't understand is the 5 or 6 second stuff. A second or 2, yeah, but the longer ones are puzzling.
Again, it is what it is. In most cases I really don't care as time is not of that much importance. I switched from ST more to get the local rather than anything else.
If I get some time I'll create the rule again, test it and track the timing and the Lighting and show you the comparison.
And my point is that it isn't. There must have been something wrong with the rule that you had set up that was causing that delay. My lights turn on instantly with rule machine.
If it was just that one rule, yes. But rules in general on my system run slow. Here is an example from this morning.
I issue a command to Alexa to run my morning routine. Alexa turns on a Virtual switch. HE says that switch came on at 6:15.26. The following rule was triggered at 6:15.27, a 1 second delay which is not bad:
As you can see this rule sets the mode to Home which happened at 6:15.27 which is within a second as it should be. Then there is another rule, shown below, that is triggered by Mode change. It was triggered at 6:15.32 which is 5 seconds later. Why did it take 5 seconds to trigger??
Then among other things this rule closes a contact, Home mode contact. That contact was closed at 6:15.36, another 4 second delay. And HSM was disarmed at 6:15.37, another second.
So it took 10 seconds to do all this??? I have worked with control systems for over 40 years. Even with the crude units we had 40 years ago execution was in milliseconds, not seconds. I can't imagine what is going on in the hub to be taking seconds to see things happen.
This is just one example. As I said, most of the time it really doesn't make any difference as I'm not in any hurry anyway. Don't think this as sour grapes as I like HE. It's just puzzling as to why. And I appreciate your comments and suggestions.
