New to the community and am not quite sure if this request belongs in the general category or something else, but there didnât really seem to be any âIâve got an issue I need help withâ categories so Iâm 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 âGood Night!â routine seems like it runs just fine unless I change the Smart Home Monitor to âDisarmedâ after âGood Night!â already ran. It seems to me that it should re-run itself after a bit. An example:
âGood Night!â is configured to run when âThings Quiet Downâ, which for me is when thereâs no motion for 15 mins during the hours 11pm and 4am. All it does is set the SHM to âArmed (Away)â and changes the mode to âSleepâ. In my case the motion sensors are on the main floor and Iâm sleeping upstairs. But if I need to go downstairs after this routine has already ran, then I manually change the SHM to âDisarmâ or âArmed (Stay)â so that I donât 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 âGood Night!â to re-runâthis does NOT seem to happen. Is this by design for some reason that Iâm not understanding? Or could I have somehow misconfigured something? The only exclusion on that routine is to not run when the mode is âAwayâ but in this example, the mode is still in âSleepâ.
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 isnât 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:
If that is the issue, then the easiest workaround is just have two copies of the routine. One changes the mode, and one doesnât. 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 doesnât 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 weâll see if we can help figure it out.
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 âshort introâ 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 itâs time to figure out these virtual switchesâŠ
I should add that right now thereâs really no good reason for me to have my âSleepâ mode, so Iâm just not going to set a mode at all and that should fix the âGood Night!â issue Iâve had. I may have to do the duplicate routine solution at some point though as I get more modes and routines. Thanks again.
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 donât clutter up my routines screen.
But, I am still failing at the âGood Nightâ 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 didnât detect ANY motion after being disarmed that it just didnât bother to run, which kind of makes sense as Iâm sure the SHM doesnât 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 Iâm going to spend more time this weekend testing it. Obviously if it just needs some motion, then thatâs probably fine as normally I wouldnât disarm the system unless I was about to go downstairs in the middle of the night (and thus generate some motion).
