Help: Routines & Zooz Switch - not working

SmartApps & Automations
1

Hi everyone - first time here, and first time messing with home automation. For context, my wife is generally supportive of automating our house, but she’s still not fully sold on the benefits. And then when things don’t go as expected my credibility takes a big hit :slight_smile:

Okay, here’s the situation. I installed a Zooz on/off switch that controls my front outdoor lights. The installation was fine and after a bit of troubleshooting I got the switch connected to the smartthings v2 hub. I could immediately turn the lights on and off with the app, which was pretty cool. I also added a routine for morning and night so that the lights would automatically go on at sunset and go off at sunrise. So far so good.

When the evening rolled around I patiently waited for the front lights to go on. It got darker and darker outside, and nothing. Eventually I checked the app and it told me that the “good night” routine had run at 7:12pm and that the hub had turned my front lights on. The app was showing the lights in the on position. But I was staring at the lights, and they were definitely off. When I manually told the app to turn the lights on, it worked fine. When I manually clicked the “good night” routine, it also worked. I thought maybe this was a fluke so waited to see what would happen this morning.

Unfortunately, the exact same thing happened. The “good morning” routine ran successfully, but the lights never went off. But this time, the app wasn’t able to control the lights at all. I tried over and over for a minute and nothing. Then suddenly it worked again. As I write this I’m able to turn them on and off manually with the device switch or by running the “good morning” or “good night” routine.

Sorry for the long ramble, but thought more info was better than less. My hub is on the second floor of my house plugged into my modem/router and I’ve never had any problem (other than this morning) manually controlling the lights from anywhere in my house. So I think the signal from the hub is strong enough. The hub is only about 25 feet from the front light switch, through one ceiling/floor.

Any ideas? So far I’m 0/2 in getting the lights to turn on and off through a routine (unless I click the routine manually in the app). Thanks for your help!

2

Sunset/sunrise times have to be downloaded from the cloud to the hub before automations that use those can fire. So it’s quite common that when you set up a new rule of this type, it won’t run for the first 24 hours.

On the other hand, if you set up a rule just based on time of day, like “7 PM” then it should work immediately.

You can definitely put in a request to support and have them look at it, but my first suggestion would just be to create your sunset/sunrise rules and then wait 24 hours before you check to see if they’re working.

https://support.smartthings.com/hc/en-us

3

Thanks for the response! It seems like, however, that the routine ran just fine - the app reported that the routine fired at 7:12pm last evening. And it reported that the lights turned on. But the lights definitely did not turn on. Same thing this morning at sunrise. App reported that everything ran correctly, but the lights did not go off.

I did a quick test to see if I could get a routine to correctly control the lights. I created a test routine that was set to run the automation (turn lights on) at a set time of day. That ran 100% correct - the app reported the routine ran and the lights turned on as they should. I tested turning them off too and it was flawless.

Any idea why the “good night” and “good morning” routines didn’t work the same way? The only difference I can see (other than the variable sunrise/sunset time) is that the “good morning” and “good night” routines also change the “mode” from “night” to “home” or vice versa. My simple test routine did not. I’m not exactly sure what the point of the “mode” is, but could that be impacting the ability to activate the switch?

I’ll see what happens tonight, but if anyone has a similar experience I’d love any advice!

4

That does sound odd. I suggest getting in touch with support, as they can look into all the details and see what’s different.

https://support.smartthings.com/hc/en-us