Structuring Multiple Room Lighting instances to not conflict with each other

💡 Lighting Room Lighting
1

I'm trying to replace my vairous RM rules controlling my house lights with various Room Lighting instances and am struggling to determine the best way of making sure that the Room Lighting instances don't overlap/conflict with each other. Hoping someone may be able to point me in the direction of "best practice".

In the kitchen I have different light schemes depending on time of day (modes aren't really an option unfortunately given the number - e.g. I have one lighting scheme for sunset to 90 minutes after sunset, another for the 90 minutes after that and so on).

So in the below Room Lighting instance, I have limited activation to between Sunrise and Sunset with the lights turning off 5 minutes after motion becomes inactive.

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The next instance will take over from Sunset +1 minute until Sunset +90.

My question really is this. How do I best structure the above instance (and the rest) so say, motion is detected 1 minute before Sunset in the above Sunset/Sunrise instance and then the next Sunset+1 until Sunset +90 instance kicks in, that:

  1. the lights will still turn off if there is no motion detected in the Sunset+1 until Sunset +90 instance (i.e. the first instance will still turn the lights off);

but

  1. if motion is detected in the second instance (say two minutes after Sunset), the first instance will no longer turn of the lights.

I've been experimenting with limiting turning off under Conditions etc. but I still get situations where the handover occurs and the lights turn off - don't turn on etc. So hoping someone can point me in the right direction so I can get all my Room Lighting instances correct from the start rather than the trial and error method I've been using.

Thanks!

2

Why are modes not an option? I have 12 modes myself and that has worked well for me.

1 Like
3

I also would suggest just adding a couple modes, it would be the least complicated thing to do in my experience. With modes, you could have everything in one rule if you wanted to, and just set lights and timeouts by mode.

Otherwise, I wonder if you could set a virtual switch to on from the first rule when the rule is active, and disable the second rule when this VS is on. Then when the VS goes inactive, the second rule could resume. Admittedly I didn't try that to see if it would actually work, but there are options to limit activation and so on in the RL app, so I believe it should work.

4

Thanks @JamesTX10 and @neonturbo for the tips. I guess I could try to expand the modes beyond the 6 I already have. I was worried about tracking 15 or so modes but if I follow a straightforward naming convention (e.g. Sunset +90; Sunset +180 etc.) then it could be workable. Otherwise I will try the switch method to disable instances once the next has kicked in.

[edit: fixed typo]