Good night routine only running once?

[awc (Allen Crawford)]

Hello,

New to the community and am not quite sure if this request belongs in the general category or something else, but there didn’t really seem to be any “I’ve got an issue I need help with” categories so I’m not sure if that means I should be emailing Support for things like this or not. Anyway, this is possibly a newbie question, but my “Good Night!” routine seems like it runs just fine unless I change the Smart Home Monitor to “Disarmed” after “Good Night!” already ran. It seems to me that it should re-run itself after a bit. An example:

“Good Night!” is configured to run when “Things Quiet Down”, which for me is when there’s no motion for 15 mins during the hours 11pm and 4am. All it does is set the SHM to “Armed (Away)” and changes the mode to “Sleep”. In my case the motion sensors are on the main floor and I’m sleeping upstairs. But if I need to go downstairs after this routine has already ran, then I manually change the SHM to “Disarm” or “Armed (Stay)” so that I don’t set the alarm off and wake the house up. This works great of course.

But then I go back upstairs to bed, and would assume that 15 mins later (with no motion of course) it would cause “Good Night!” to re-run–this does NOT seem to happen. Is this by design for some reason that I’m not understanding? Or could I have somehow misconfigured something? The only exclusion on that routine is to not run when the mode is “Away” but in this example, the mode is still in “Sleep”.

[JDRoberts]

Welcome!

It could be a bug, in which case you would report it to support, but from the description it sounds more to me like this is an issue with modes.

The short answer is that nothing in a routine will run if that routine includes a mode change and the system is already in that mode. It just isn’t how Smartthings works.

This most commonly trips people up when they are setting up a routine for when people come home. And then they find that it only works for the first person who comes home. So the explanation is in the following FAQ. I understand this is not your specific issue, but take a look at it because it might explain:

FAQ: Routine Only Seems to Work for First Person Who Comes Home

Updated 12 November 2015 At some point, there was a change and now routines WILL run even if the house is in the mode you're going to change into. That's good, it's just confusing because it's unclear if this is now always true or only sometimes. Until there's some official documentation, I'll leave the rest of this in place as it's one of those "can't hurt, might help" things. Possibly this is a mode issue. It did exist as a problem with v one, but only with hello home actions, not with shortcut groups. It's pretty simple once you understand what's going on, it's just there's nothing anywhere that tells you that this is what's going to happen with routines. OK if you have a routine that changes the mode, then nothing in that routine will run if the house is already in that mode. …

If that is the issue, then the easiest workaround is just have two copies of the routine. One changes the mode, and one doesn’t. You set the one that does change the mode to run based on your automatic conditions. And Then you can still manually run the one that doesn’t change the mode whenever you need it.

If after looking this over you think this is not your issue, just give us some more details and we’ll see if we can help figure it out.

[awc (Allen Crawford)]

Thank you very much. This definitely makes sense knowing how routines/modes work. I was about to ask if there was a good source for us beginners, but I found your awesome “short intro” post and one thing led to another which lead to the community wiki, which is exactly the sort of thing I was trying to find. Now it’s time to figure out these virtual switches…

[awc (Allen Crawford)]

I should add that right now there’s really no good reason for me to have my “Sleep” mode, so I’m just not going to set a mode at all and that should fix the “Good Night!” issue I’ve had. I may have to do the duplicate routine solution at some point though as I get more modes and routines. Thanks again.

[JDRoberts]

Now it’s time to figure out these virtual switches…

This might help.

FAQ: Creating a virtual Device

Need a FAQ for the simplest version of this: a virtual on/off switch. Maybe even two FAQs, one for why you would want one with use case examples and one step by step how to for creating one in ST. Thanks!

[awc (Allen Crawford)]

Well, I figured out the virtual switches and copied your method of having a room of them with the Alexa Helper app so that I don’t clutter up my routines screen.

But, I am still failing at the “Good Night” routine. I just modified it to not change the mode at all and last night at 11pm it changed to Armed (Away) mode as desired. Then two mins later I disarmed the SHM and waited another 15 mins (longer, actually) and it never re-ran the Good Night routine and was disarmed all night. My only other thought is that since it didn’t detect ANY motion after being disarmed that it just didn’t bother to run, which kind of makes sense as I’m sure the SHM doesn’t have any sort of communication with the routine (e.g. the routine is just waiting for a lack of motion, which already happened and continued to happen all night).

I was too tired and lazy to go downstairs to generate motion, so I’m going to spend more time this weekend testing it. Obviously if it just needs some motion, then that’s probably fine as normally I wouldn’t disarm the system unless I was about to go downstairs in the middle of the night (and thus generate some motion).

[awc (Allen Crawford)]

My theory has been confirmed. If I disarm the SHM the routine will need to see some motion again before “Things quiet down” gets triggered. Yay.