Quick Light Routine Question--turn off after x minutes?

SmartApps & Automations
1

Hey guys, new to Smartthings, go easy on me :slight_smile:

I use the default routine of Hello with Life360. It is simple and as soon as my wife’s phone is detected near home, it turns on the outside lights and the kitchen light to help my wife get into the house.

Is there any way to make the outside lights turn off automatically after 10 minutes? I couldn’t see it in the options.

Thanks if anyone can help.

2

Sure, but you do it with the official “smart lighting” feature, not with a routine. It’s called “power allowance.”

There’s a how to article in the community – created wiki that explains how to do it:

http://thingsthataresmart.wiki/index.php?title=How_to_create_a_virtual_timer_for_a_light

And welcome to SmartThings! This is typical, by the way. There’s almost always a way to do pretty much anything you can think of, but it isn’t necessarily easy to find. Feel free to ask in the forums anytime you get stuck and someone can probably explain how to do it. :sunglasses:

3

Wow, thanks for the quick response, JD, really appreciate it.

Maybe I could ask one other question. Is there any good way to deal with 2 users and coming and going? I set up one routine that says Craig leaving and one routine that says Richelle leaving, and the same for arriving. If I am at home and the wife goes out, no need to turn all the lights off as the routine does.

4

Normally you would do this with the modes “home” and “away.” So you would set up your routines with one for Craig and one for Richelle, but you would tell each routine to only run in the appropriate mode and you would also have the routine change the mode as appropriate.

So you start out with both of you away and the mode is “away.”

Craig has and “I’m home” routine which only runs when the Mode is away.
Richelle has a similar routine.

Craig gets home first. Because the mode is “away”, his “I’m home” routine will run and do whatever it is supposed to. It would also change the mode to “home” meaning somebody is home.

Richhelle gets home second. Because now the mode is “home” her “I’m home” routine doesn’t run at all.

It may also be that you want to get more complicated, and have one routine for “I just got home but somebody else was already home,” so maybe it turns on the porch lights and unlocks the door, but it doesn’t do some other things.

It’s up to you. If you start getting a whole bunch of really complicated conditions, you might want to use web core instead of the official routines. Web core let you set up much more complicated rules.

Also check the setup wizard for the routine – – there used to be an option for “everybody leaves” which would check to see that multiple people had left. I can’t use the mobile app right now, so I don’t know if that has changed. But if it’s still there, that’s an easy way to keep from turning the lights off when one person leaves and another is still home.

I’m sorry, I’m not feeling very well today, so I’ll let other people help you with this going forward but at least that gives you a way to start thinking about it.

Also, the following might help, although the screenshots are going to be out of date:

1 Like
5

thanks so much JD, will be able to figure it out from here. Great asset to the community. Hope you feel better, and thanks again for your help!!

1 Like
6

Creating multiple smartapps to accomplish this is rediculouse at this point. Is Smartthings ever going to update the smartlighting app to do this internally?