I have a Rule that should run every day at 31 minutes past Sunrise. The other day I happened to see the History had shown it activated at 5:20am. Realising that was way too early I updated the Rule at the weekend. It now seems to be running every day at 6:48am instead of updating.
We had this sort of thing happening with Automations in February and I seem to remember it was resolved and that the time should update every day (in the past it used to update every few days).
Anyone else seeing Sunrise/Sunset issues like this with Rules?
I have 2 automations, one is activated at sunset and the other at sunset-30 minutes and the time is updated every day and they work well.
In Europe, UTC + 2 time zone
I’ve documented the inconsistent behavior with the conditional references(Sunset, Sunrise, Noon, etc.) as some of them were working fine on my side (specially the Noon reference), but others were just random.
So, as soon as I have an update, I’ll share an update below.
Thanks. As far as I can see, using an offset from one of the time references is the only way to define a specific time. Noon certainly seems OK, but then I’m not sure if I’ve encountered a daylight savings time change with it yet and so it hasn’t needed to change. The actual time used for Sunrise and an offset is correct when first saved but just doesn’t update for me.
Thank you for the follow-up, @orangebucket. I found the report made by Erick and asked for an update from the team. Once they reply, I’ll let you know their comments.
Hi, @orangebucket
The Engineering Team has been evaluating your case. They mention that this Rule of yours seems to be in a strange state and they believe this might be the root cause of the issue. Can you please delete that Rule and create it again to see if this still happens? We would appreciate it a lot. Please keep us updated.
The new Rule ran for the first time at 5:59am yesterday (Thursday) which was strictly speaking already a couple of minutes late relative to the actual sunrise yesterday morning. As I wasn’t sure whether to expect ‘sunrise’ to be correct for the day or it to be the previous day’s time plus 24 hours, that was unremarkable.
Today (Friday) it also ran at 5:59am which is four or five minutes late, and more significantly hasn’t changed. My understanding is that the time should be updated daily (I know sun times in Automations/Routines used to be allowed to drift by a few minutes, but that was quite some time ago).
Update: Saturday it ran at 5:59am.
Update: Sunday it ran at 5:59am.
Update: Monday it ran at … (drum roll) … 5:59am.
Does the rule still execute every day at the exact same minute? Several of us try reproducing this issue but weren’t able to. All of us had the same results. The sunrise changes a minute or so every day. In my case, for example, I make two Rules, one that turns on a switch every sunrise, and another one that turns off the same switch every sunset. Here you can see the history of that switch attached. It is updated every single day:
Yes, currently 5:59am as it has been since I last recreated the Rule. The rule uses ‘every’ and it is an offset of 31 minutes after sunrise, not sunrise itself. Sunrise was about 4:58am this morning.
It used to work fine then just stopped last September.
Apart from this one Rule, I only use sunrise/sunset offsets to restrict the active period for motion controlled lighting. I can’t remember if those were also affected as I just used to restart them all every so often just in case.
The rule I am having problems with runs in the cloud. I probably ought to do some more diagnosis of my own but it is a bit tedious waiting 24 hours for results.
Anyhow, it fails to update the time correctly, disregarding that it is cloud or local. This should be a basic feature without any issues. It is like home automation 101.
There is probably something subtle about the problem given there aren’t gazillions of complaints and it could well be something I’ve done wrong, though if it is then it wasn’t so wrong that it didn’t once work.
