I tried this last night for a Jasco zw4101 and ran into some issues. Its for the Christmas tree and I want it to come on from 7-9 in the AM and then 4-10 in the PM. I tried using an on/off via time in the SmartApps, but once you set one off time then you can’t set another. I also went the route of using IFTTT, but their system is just not reliable from a timing perspective. Occasionally its 5 minutes late and others 30, so would rather do this from ST.
This is inelegant, but will work: Put it in Lights & Switches twice, with slightly different names. Use the first one for 7-9 AM, and the second one for 4-10 PM.
Such a fundamental thing, this seems insane… is this really best way everyone has found to do this? I mean, this is going to be the implementation for all the lights in our house that are scheduled so I’ll have dupes of everything.
I agree you should be able to have multiple schedules for one switch. But a work around if you are going to have multiple lights follow the same on/off you could make one fixture comprised of all the lights and turn them on/off with the dashboard. Then make another fixture with all the same lights and add the other on off schedule.
It’s sad that there are probably 10 ways to accomplish this, but all would be considered workarounds. I wonder which workaround is the most efficient? I have this issue with my Xmas tree lights. I have one group in Lights&Switches that is for weekday evenings, then I have two instances of the Smart Turn It On for weekday mornings and weekends. (We like to have the trees on when we’re home).
You wrote that it was for the Christmas tree, a simple twice a day schedule. If you are talking about a broader issue of scheduling lighting, there are other ways to do what you want that don’t entail “dupes of everything”. For example, it would not be difficult to write a smart app that offers multiple schedules. I use one tied to modes that offers different dimmer levels based on mode, which is itself time-of-day driven.
ST sometimes seems like a puzzle. A solvable puzzle, but not obvious.
Anyway, having duplicate “shortcuts” in Lights and Switches is a standard way to deal with unusual scheduling and control issues. Once you have set these things up, they don’t eat any time / space / maintenance. It’s just the glue that you build with.
@tslagle13 which smartapps would you use? I only see turn on or turn off a device. Once you use it once for a given device, you do not have the option to assign it again to the same device without renaming it. I don’t mind doing that, it just seems limiting.
@tslagle13 Yeah, i’ve notice a lot of those smarts apps i used to use for this are removed now they have added the dashboad, so it has made it a little more difficult to do the multiple schedules than it has been in the past.