Door sensor triggering different sets of lights depending on Mode

[JDRoberts]

@MsFizz

I have a door sensor that I’m using to trigger a “Meal Time” scenario.

I want to have different lights on and Sonos stations playing in my kitchen area depending on the time of day when the Meal Time sensor is open.

It seems like I could do this with a combination of Actions and Modes but there is no “Mode checking” capability within the door sensor screen.

I would like “When Meal Sensor is Open, turn on certain lights BUT only in Evening Mode.”

Am I approaching this the wrong way?

Would love some help

This should be doable with standard hello home phrases. It’s just they have one strange quirk: you will only be given access to the motion sensor option if you set the Hello Home Action up to change the mode. But you only have to do that the very first time you set it up, you can then go back in and take out the mode change and it will still work.

And you will need to set up one HHA for each variation.

So not the most elegant, and you May prefer one of the community-created options.

Modes, Motion Sensors, and Hello Home Actions

If I understand something @Ryanh told me in another topic, if you have a Hello Home Action that changes the mode and uses a motion sensor through “Things Start Happening,” that hello home action will not fire if the house is already in the mode the hello home action is going to change to. If I’m understanding this correctly it appears to be undocumented ( @Jim? ) . More importantly, it might explain why so many community members report their motion sensor triggered actions “just stop working,” because the problem might be a mode change in a completely different action/smartapp. It might also explain the unpredictability of the sensor “failures.” Because it wouldn’t really have anything to do with the sensor device itself, but rather other things that set the mode. But it would only show…