Say, if guests are over for a weekend or maybe a week or two?
I'm mostly lr now and the rest of the Z-wave devices talk direct. I have one zigbee device.
Say, if guests are over for a weekend or maybe a week or two?
I'm mostly lr now and the rest of the Z-wave devices talk direct. I have one zigbee device.
I've been in a similar situation myself, had to handle an "influx" of guests without having planned it ahead of time...
My guess is you want to disable a bunch of automations rather than, necessarily disable the devices themselves? At least that is the way I would approach it... I would suggest a set of "stuff" to handle this... choose what you will, whether it be virtual switches, rule private booleans, etc... My pick would by VS's....Or tell your visitors to find another home...
Shut down the hub from the settings menu and then power cycle it when your guests leave?
That is a legitimate option.... You could even sabotage the experience for the guests to encourage them to... leave..
The actual approach that would be preferable would be to adjust your automations to handle your visitors... Which could be a separate post,,, or another here...
I think it really depends on whether the goal is to disable some automations, or all of them.
I have a Guest virtual switch managed by my Google Calendar using GCal Search integration. I have several rules that check the state of this switch and will not run certain actions such as turning off the guest bed/bath room lights, HSM, etc.
I'd like to disable everything.
The shutdown/delayed power cycle seems best.
For whatever reason, I was thinking possible mesh issues, but the shutdown is controlled, so, no biggie.
Maybe for now, but if a recurring event, might be worth considering a different approach...
Or don't invite any guests... like I commonly do...
I, too, am not particularly sociable.
That is exactly what I do. I use a single virtual switch that I flip when guests are over.
Every motion automation checks this switch status before running, it is basically a kill switch. I also have virtual switches that disable motion detection automations individually per room.
When the kill switch is flipped on, it also sets a timer to turn it back off the next day to resume automations.
Just go through and disable the rules? For a one-time event, that is probably easiest. The devices will still talk to the hub, but any actions won't work.
I have never done so, but can't you write a rule that disables the other rules?
Modes are an option as well, add a guest mode to rules and disallow the rule to run if you flip a virtual switch and activate guest mode?
I have VSs for each of our guest bedrooms, primarily to stop the morning automations from opening the blackout shades.
I handle this problem generally for all my automations by having a set of virtual switches called Foo Manual Control, each controlling a different area of the house. This way I can turn off automations in various areas without affecteding other areas.
Manual Control itself is a Groups and Scenes device that just lists all the various virtual switches. This way, if one individual switch is turned on, Manual Control gets automatically turned on. And if I manually turn on Manual Control, then all the virtual switches gets turned on. E.g., it turns off all automations.
I then use each of the virtual switches in Rules and other automations to disable each thing.
E.g., some lights are automated, but when we have the book club meeting in the house, we want to keep those lights on all the time. Thus, in that case, I turn on Front Hall Manual Control and disable the Room Lighting it is used in:
And in Motion Lighting:
And in Rules (done various ways):
I expose them all to Alexa so I can say "computer turn on Living Room Manual Control" or I can use a quick dashboard:
I started this approach when originally using SmartThings and webCoRE (I probably saw someone suggest thjis approach over in that community circa 2016), and carried it over to Hubitat. Thus, I built everything from day 1 using these switches. However, it's really easy to set up and then add to existing rules.
Not a bad idea, but it wouldn't work for me really. I keep track of my modes (scenes) in a driver attribute along with my other sensor data. My automations are all grooy apps, and all my scene changes are based on outside light changes and schedules through the day. It is easiest for me to just put the switch check in my scene execution method, and let the scenes change as normal in the background. Then when guest leaves, the room is set to the correct scene already to continue automations.
I do use mode, but not for scenes. I only use it for Home or Away state based on geofence.