can I run a mode triggering action only be triggered at a certain time while another mode will be triggered at other times doing different actions.
in English:
I want to set a day mode that unlocks the door and disarms the system but it should only do so from 7am to 7pm and have a night mode which only turns on the light by the front door when someone arrives from 7pm to 7am?
You can get to the same end result, but it’s not that the modes them selves have time schedules, rather it’s that you would run a routine that changes from one mode to the other at a specific time. Many of us do this.
For example, at my house there is a routine that runs at 7 AM every morning and changes the mode to “home.”
Then there is another routine that runs at sunset -15 minutes every day, and changes the mode to “night.”
You can only have one mode active at any one time. So it’s up to you to decide when and how to change from one to another, typically in a routine.
Modes vs Routines
One additional clarification: modes themselves don’t “do” anything. They don’t “run”. They don’t “unlock doors”.
A Mode is a condition which you can use to determine whether routines and smart apps will execute.
So in your example, you would set up a routine that unlocks the door.
Then there are several different ways That you can control whether that routine executes or not. One would be to say the routine only executes during a specific mode.
The routine executes. It’s the routine that unlocks the door. The mode is just a condition that the routine checks before it executes to see if it’s allowed to execute at that moment.
Why not just use time?
A mode is different from a time schedule because you can turn it on for whatever reason you want.
As I mentioned, at our house, “home” is set at a specific time every day. And “night” is set based on sunset.
But we have a third mode “asleep” which I set manually every night. My schedule is extremely variable. Sometimes I go to bed at 7 PM, sometimes I don’t go to bed until three in the morning.
So I’m the one who decides exactly when the house changes from “night” to “asleep”.
When the house is in night mode, there is a motion sensor in the bedroom which will turn on the overhead light when motion is detected. But when the house is in sleep mode, that same motion sensor does not turn on the overhead light – – instead it turns on a soft night light.
You could have mode changes for other reasons, as well, such as when someone gets home, which again can happen at different times of the day.
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makes a lot more sense now.
so I use a routine to change the mode. is there an alert or warning if you have conflicting or overlapping routines?
Unfortunately, no. 