New to ST - Does DST work? (Fall 2020)

Former Wink user here that replaced it with the ST Hub. Now that we’ve rolled clocks back, all of my lighting that was set to come on at 5pm via the Smart Lighting app, came on at 4pm.

I was unable to find any setting in the app that allows you to tell the Hub to actually be smart about the local time zone or in the automations that I set up.

Doesn’t seem like a stretch that a “smart” hub would know how to set the time via a time server. Or, is it me that is not smart?

It occurs to some users. It should sync up by tomorrow after automations run today and set up the schedule for the next run.

@jdroberts will provide better details :slight_smile:

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I’ve been here since 2014 and it’s been wrong for some significant number of users every year, twice a year, since that time. They usually get it sorted out in a couple of days, but it’s definitely annoying. :rage:

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I won’t post them all, but you get the idea. :wink:

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Yes, I do get the idea and by looking at your posts, it would appear Samsung has not given a hoot about DST going on 4+ years. Waiting for things to sync up in a day or two is absurd when the Hub should be getting its time from a master time server based on settings we do not have access to.

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More like 6, but yeah. :scream:

You can report it to support if you want, but it just seems to be an artifact of their cloud system.

I’m not saying that’s acceptable, there are obviously lots of other cloud-based systems that get this right, but since I’m just another customer, I don’t have any idea of how to get them to fix it.

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So my support ticket was answered with a weak set of instructions to remedy the issue.

I (we) are supposed to go into manage our location, select our geolocation, and zoom out and pick some random spot on the map that is not in our time zone.

Then, we are supposed to go back in and select the correct geolocation and all will be right in the world.

As an IT person for the last 30 years, I find that solution to be weak. The developers should be pointing their Hubs to a stratum 1 time server, or multiple time servers. This can be coded easily enough based on a single setting in the app that allows the user to pick their time zone vs. geolocation.

Once the time zone is selected, the Hub should auto update the time based on the known dates when DST starts and ends - it’s a constant. Unless of course Congress changes it again.

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Is this really as trivial as many seem to believe? Genuine question.

Automations have to schedule their next executions. If they specify them as e.g. x seconds from now a DST change will throw them out by an hour either way. If they specify them as dates and times they are locked to one timezone so again they will be an hour out. If local time of day, well does that make any sense on a cloud system?