I have some basic timer rules setup within Hubitat C7 for some bathroom fans that react based on buttons pushed.
Before I started with Hubitat, I had some wifi smart plugs that worked with the Smart Life app. With that app, I could easily set the plug to turn on/off as needed based on a timer or schedule. It was simple. It was user friendly.
I haven't needed timers that often but I now have some use cases and I can't figure out how to do it in a similar user friendly way.
Any suggestions?
How would you like to activate the timer? Dashboard? Alexa? Physical button press? Other?
One option is to use a dedicated app, like Auto Off or Auto_Off. Both are available in Hubitat Package Manager, at least the last I knew they both were.
Another option would be to use a virtual switch and a rule to turn off "X" minutes after it turns on. This would be fairly flexible and would work by voice command as well as dashboards.
Depending upon the time you need, virtual switches also can turn themselves off at a few predetermined intervals, you could just simply turn that virtual switch on, and it turns itself off. The choices are fairly limited and short, I think the longest you can get is 10 seconds? But that might be fine for some specific cases.
Yup, not the most elegant, but using a dimmer as a timer allow for me to tell Alexa, exhaust fan 30 for those time I jump into the shower and forgot to push the button.
Yes I have a humidity sensor in the room but haven’t got around to hooking it in yet.
We have a Google Home house. I really don't care much for Google or Amazon when it comes to hardware (or other things) but we went the Google route.
I've done a few things with timers for bathroom fans that respond to a button push from a Zooz switch. Those fans also switch on a few times a day to cycle air. It works like you would expect from devices before the smarthome era.
The timer I would like to see is something that is flexible and intuitive like I described above. In the SmartLife app, you could use the app to select you smart plug and turn it off/on, set a timer to turn it off/on, set a schedule to turn it off/on.
I wanted to get all of my smarthome in one app instead of a separate app for everything which is why I started utilizing mostly devices that work with Hubitat. I can't find a solution for the smart plug that fits my needs, yet.
The current use case that I want to use a smart plug for is an electric blanket. We have an electric blanket that I'd like to turn off after 30 minutes or an hour. The blanked itself shuts off after 8 hours or something like that. We just want it to warm up the mattress and sheets before we get in bed.
This?
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