I just noticed last night that at 1031PM that some lights in my house were turned on despite not being on a routine or automation. This has been happening for a few weeks I think - I’m not really sure when it happened because I am often in bed before 1031PM. My lights are all set to turn off at 1230AM anyways, so when I get up, everything is normal. I have reached out to Samsungs support, but it will probably take a day or so to get something back. So I decided to do some trouble shooting of my own to see if I can figure out what the issue is.
I have 1 SmartApp Smart Lighting routine called “Upstairs Lighting” that turns 3 bedroom lights on at 5PM and turns them off at 1030PM. These lights are turned off every night at 1031PM per the log. At the same time, I have 10 other lights that seem to do different things. I have gone and looked at all routines, SmartApps, Alexa, etc and there is nothing else running or being told to execute a command for the other 10 devices. I’ve looked on the Smartthings event list and there are no obvious errors of note. What is strange is that there appears to be not real set pattern. 13 lights are affected at 1031PM. However, I did noticed that 7 lights were not affected on 3 different days over the past week. Not all 3 lights were affected on the same days, though, these days were Mon(4 Lights)/Wed(3 Lights)/Fri(1 Light). I also noticed that 2 lights were told to execute a completely different command at 1031PM - dimming to 77% on one light ant 92% on another - both on the same night. The typical command is either ‘switch on’ - which turns the light on to 100%, or ‘level 0.’ Luckily the 3 bedroom lights keep with the ‘level 0’ command.
So all of the above is a bit strange. I reset my router, ST hub and Lutron Hub today. Am I crazy to think that the Automation I had in the Smart Lighting App listed as “Upstairs Lighting” just became corrupt? To me, it would appear to the the case. I just want to be sure I haven’t missed anything here in doing all my own trouble shooting. I have gone ahead and removed the Automation and will see what happens with the lights at 1031PM tonight. I will just turn the bedroom lights off via the switches/remotes in each designated room.
I’ve looked all over to see if anyone has had a similar issue and I havent come across any.
If anyone has any thoughts, that would be great! FYI- all firmware is up to date, etc. Havent had any other issues with Smartthings.
The only thing that comes to mind, is that I’ve noticed after power outage event, that some of my smart bulbs will end up as on, where they normally would not be.
I think it happens if the power interruption event occurs during the automation event that would normally turn them off. Otherwise, depending on how the bulb restores itself after a power failure, I suppose it’s possible that some bulbs could default to on…
Anyway, just another thing to consider.
edit: So, i did an experiment, and one of my bulbs will toggle on and off, when power is interrupted a few times consecutively. I would think, though, that if you had a power interruption, you would see some clocks reset etc…
Thanks for the reply, however, there have been no power issues here. No spikes, etc. I’ve read that as possibilities, but that’s just not the case in this application. Especially considering it’s happened to pretty much the same devises and some are spared all the time - devices are all on different floors of the house too.
Do you have any voice controls, like Alexa and the like?
The reason I ask, is that on some rare occasions, Alexa has been known to execute a command, by thinking it heard someone say to turn on or off something, or a group, in your case.
That also seems unlikely, since you had turned in for the night.
I looked into that, as well as the ‘hunch’ feature in the Alexa App. There are no logs that suggest that’s happened - I went back over the past month’s worth of things said to Alexa and found nothing. There were no hunches either. I disabled the feature for future potential trouble with that.
I really looked into all the associates apps and synced ‘devices’, accounts and whatnot and I just can’t see anything. It’s just strange that all of these other lights get a command at the same time as an original automation that I’ve been running for 3 years without problems! And what happens isn’t anything reminiscent of an old ‘routine.’ What happens with the lights isn’t what I’d do at all at 1030 at night.
My guess is that, and we know it happens a fair amount, is that SMARTTHINGS got a bug and it affected my one routine somehow. Only way to really know is by doing what I did earlier, and removed that routine. This way there will be nothing run at 1030 and I’ll see what happens with the lights. If nothing happens, then I’ll try reinstalling the routine.
I’ve had really great luck with SMARTTHINGS over the past 3-4 years. I’ve only had one instance with a switch commanding another device when turned on via the actual switch itself and not in the app. I had to remove both and re-add it which seemed to work. So weird things are certainly possible.
I’ve been very pleased with Smartthings, as well. Although, some occasional anomaly has popped up, and I just assumed it was gremlins or something.
I suppose it’s best to report something like that, as there’s no telling what else could be affected, if it happened to be due to some recent change in firmware etc.
I forgot that I run SMARTTHINGS via Actiontiles on my iPad mini, which I have installed in a wall. I run the Actiontiles website via an app called Kiosker. The interface is amazing. I have contacted both the Actiontiles and Kiosker developers to see if there were any possible errors on their side they could look up. However, I don’t think that’s likely since a button would have to be pressed in order to create the action via SMARTTHINGS. I highly doubt that an error in the App or website occurs at the same time every night that creates a reaction in SMARTTHINGS that coincides with an already programmed routine. BUT, I suppose anything is possible, which is why I’ve reached out.
Since I never came up with anything like this in my online search, and I seem to be trouble shooting this well on my own, I figured it was good to put this on here anyways just in case someone else has the same problem in the future.
Rapidly approaching the dreaded 1031PM time…will update on here what happens since the removal of the original routine.
So I passed 1031 and there was no action that occurred visibly in the house with any of the lights. HOWEVER, the Smartthings log still shows that 6 lights executed a command. SO, this is an improvement over the 13 lights that were affected and actually caused a physical response with the lights. The 6 lights that were logged did the same command as previously.
I’m honestly at a loss at this point. There has to be some bug with my ST’s and these devices. I am going to let this scenario go over the next 2 nights and see what happens. I am likely going to delete and add the offending lights back in.
I had thought about creating a routine for the offending lights to do something at 1030 and let it register and then deleting that to see if that some how creates something internally in the software to shut off whatever its telling the devices to do.
Frustrating.
I’ll report back on this when I figure it all out.
I’m using Lutron Caseta switches. These are the only thing affected.
I am going to remove the offending lights and re-add. If that doesn’t work, then I will remove the Lutron connection and re link these two back up and build that routines I had back from scratch. Don’t really want to do this, but I gotta get rid of a big in the system somewhere!
I removed the routine that was being run at 1030 and that seemed to help stop any of the ‘other’ lights from running. However, the Smartthings ‘History’ still showed that lights were told to run (dim/on/off). Again, nothing physically happened with the lights. I watched this for a few days and it was the same problem.
I contacted ST help throughout and they told me to delete the app and reinstall. This did not work.
SO, I decided I was going to remove each light one by one and re-add them. I started with one and removed it from the Lutron App (and subsequently the ST App as well). However (and I forgot), you cant really add 1 light back in like this. So I removed the sync with ST and Lutron and then signed back in. Essentially this caused me to lose all lights in all of my routines in the Smart App Smart Lighting, but the Routine name was still preserved. So, I went back and added all the proper lights to each routine…AND…NOTHING WORKED. SO, my assumption at this point was that it wasnt a problem between ST and Lutron…it was a Smartthings problem with their programing - as I had originally thought. I decided to delete all of the Smart Lighting routines and remove the app (which I could not do due to a ‘network’ error). I then added the routines back with the proper lights and it all worked. I passed the 1030 hour last night and NO faulty messages were logged in the history. Clearly the Smart Lighting App had a bug but ST wasnt able to diagnose this. It wasnt a problem between ST and Lutron - they were all communicating properly.
So, should anyone have any problems with routines they are running via the Smart Lighting SmartApp, my suggestion is to 1. Delete the routine and reinstall. If it happens again… 2. Delete all routines and the SmartApp, if possible, and rebuild your system. Just remember to write down all the particulars for the routines before you delete to save the headache.
Just to point out: Smart Lighting will be phased out when groovy is shut down. That could be by the end of this year or early next year. The exact date has not been set but you may want to start planning and/or moving any of your Smart Lighting rules over to Automations and/or Rules API
Groovy is the scripting language used to code smart apps and device handlers. That will be replaced with Edge using Lua. Edge is currently in beta. Others can explain it better.
Thanks for sharing! I guess I need to pay more attention to this moving forward. It looks like they plan on somehow ‘replacing’ this, but we shall see. I spent like 3 hours getting all my routines set back up via the Smart Lighting app, so I’ll just ride that out until it breaks and then switch over the automations. Problem is, thats really clunky to do with the if/then stuff. Not looking forward to that, but I just wrote all that stuff out on paper last night…guess I’m not throwing that paper out!
What’s the brand and model of the affected lights?