I am curious who has great stories about things not working as intended?
Here is mine.
We had family over for the holidays, and my nephew was sleeping on the couch in our theater room. There was an automation that would turn the lights on when motion was detected. I was using webcore for this automation and I didn’t want him to get woken up when turning over on the couch so I “fixed it”
The next morning my nephew said, I think something is wrong with your lights.
Turns out I somehow edited the automation to turn on the lights when motion was NOT detected, so every time he would fall asleep, the lights would turn on. He would move, and the lights would turn off. I still laugh about this every time I think about it. Do not drink and webcore kids.
Back prepandemic when Air BnB was increasingly popular, A friend of mine decided to add a smart lock to his separate entrance bedroom and rent it out. But he got frustrated having to remember to change the lock code each time a guest left. So he added an automation except instead of changing the lock access code at the end of the rental., It changed the code every time the lock was used!
He first thought that the lock had gone bad and he spent several days working with customer support trying to figure out what was going on before he realized he had done it with the automation. Oops!
A couple of winters ago, Smartthings changed their weather provider. Naturally, I didn’t pay any attention to it. As it happened it was one of the coldest winters we’d had in 30+ years.
Anyway, the automation would change the HVAC from heating to off to cooling depending on the external temperature. The outside temp at home was -5F and the house was getting real cold (65F). I looked at our “smart” thermostat and it said it was set for air conditioning so the heat wasn’t running. The new weather provider had me pegged as bing in Rio, where it was 90f, warm enough to auto trigger the air conditioning.
Our Kid came in the other morning to say he’d had a rubbish night’s sleep. His lights kept turning on in the middle of the night.
I checked all the automations and concluded he must have been dreaming as it all looked ok.
Later that morning I went in and saw he hadn’t made his bed. I turned back his sheets to find his hue remote in his bed. He’d rolled over in the night and layed on the remote, turned his lights on, woken up, told alexa to turn them off then rolled right back over and done the same again.
My best one has featured on this forum before but is not an automation. Last June I was lying in bed late at night using my mobile and as often happens I fell asleep. Usually I am listening to music when this happens and I just wake up wondering what is playing and discover I’ve missed several tracks. That time I woke up with my mobile on my stomach and the SmartThings app open on the delete SmartApps page with SmartThings Find, STHM and webCoRE already deleted.
Restoring webCoRE from six month old backups at midnight was interesting. However it was STHM being having been uninstalled that actually caused the most problems. In the morning I discovered that uninstalling STHM causes Security Mode to be removed from Automations and any unviable ones to be deleted (same sort of result as deleting a devices has). So I had to recreate or repair everything that should have had Security Mode in it.
I was messing with a whole house automation for lighting a year or so ago, not really sure how I managed it but somehow I got onto an automation race for on off
We have a lot of led light wires powered by smart plugs, wifi side lamps, wall lights fired by a v switch into alexa which uses broadlink IR
The place went bonkers on, off, on off, off, on, on, off just crazy flashing lights and clicking of switches
Took me a few minutes of panick to figure out what and why it happened… user error
