Something Left Open app doesn't notify if mode is changed while door is still open

I set up the Something Left Open SmartApp to monitor my garage door so it would alert me if I left it on for a certain amount of time. I have a contact sensor installed on the garage door to monitor its open/close status. What I want it to do is to let me know if my door has been left open for 15 minutes only during Night or Away modes. I do not want it to alert me during Home mode as I do tend to leave my door open for longer than 15 minutes intentionally.

The app works as expected if I do not limit it to any mode. However, as soon as I limit the modes to Night and Away, I notice it wouldn’t alert me if the door was left open prior to the changing of the mode.

An example that works:
5:00 PM - Mode set to HOME
5:30 PM - Open garage door
5:45 PM - Alert is sent out because door has been left open for 15 minutes

An example that doesn’t work:
5:00 PM - Mode set to HOME
6:50 PM - Open garage door
7:00 PM - Mode set to NIGHT
7:05 PM - Door is still open but no alert is sent out
No alert is ever sent out, because I think the app resets the timer once the mode is changed.

Is there a way to get around this so if my door is left open prior to the mode change, that I would still get notified?

The timer doesn’t get “reset”… Instead, it never even starts because the SmartApp ignores detecting the door open-ing while in Home mode at 6:50pm.

This is a side-effect of how Modes are often used by SmartApp programmers.

So technically this is a bug in the SmartApp you should report to the developer or use a different SmartApp.

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It’s a long standing issue. Some guy who didn’t work for ST made an app to fix it. :wink:

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If you have access to the RBoy server, you can check out this app created on request from users for this purpose:

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