Sunset time wrong?

I have a routine to turn on my outside house lights at sunset. It’s been working for years. All of a sudden, they’re turning on way early. For example, I Google sunset at it says 7:06 PM. But my app shows the lights turned on at 5:12 PM. So it’s not a daylight savings thing.

I checked my location in the app and it does have my correct home address.

Any ideas?

Are you using Smart lighting? If yes, best advice is to switch any smart lighting rules that use sunrise/sunset over to Routines.

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Agree with this.

Also do a forum search for sunset time and sort by latest post. There have been several threads on this on the last couple of weeks.

Great, I’ll try that for tomorrow and see what happens. I have been using Smart Lighting this whole time.

Sorry, I did do a search but didn’t see anything that seemed to help. Most were from years ago, and I didn’t think to sort by date.

I guess something changed then. Most posts are at a developer level, it seems to me, but I do see the recommendations to use Routines. Thanks.

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Am I playing with fire? I am using smart lighting app to control two sets of lights, and they seem to turn on when required based on sunset. The logic isn’t too complicated, so switching shouldn’t be too hard.

I’m firmly in the “if it’s working leave it be” camp.

I used Smart Lighting/lighting to turn on some outside lights at sunset for years with almost never an issue. I did a lot in Smart Lighting, the old version, because it was the only way to get local execution.

With the new Architecture, Routines are also likely to run locally so that advantage is gone. And automations in Smart lighting, the new version, count towards the 2000 item limit for Routines, so no advantage there.

The advantage I see for Routines over Smart lighting is that Routines are listed in the Details page for devices. Neither Smart lighting nor Scenes are listed.

I’ve slowly replaced most of my Smart lighting automations with Routines. The one feature of Smart lighting that can’t be replicated in Routines is sync/mirror of dimmers.

I’ve seen this information in other posts, but it’s over my head. I don’t program or use the IDE, just set things up in the app. So I don’t even understand what’s changing with the “L” to “l” change or whether that’s automatic or what.

The original, Groovy-based version was called Smart Lighting with a capital L. That version was killed off when all the Groovy-based SmartApps were shutdown a couple of months ago.

The new version is named Smart lighting with a lowercase l. If you have working Smart lighting automations, you’ve got the new version. Migration was automatic, at least for me.

You should continue to ignore the IDE. It’s a relic of the old architecture.

I do have the lowercase “l”. But my sunset stuff hasn’t been working. I’m switching over to Routines anyway.

Thanks for the information.

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That seems to be the case with a number of folks.

Reading a bit closer on the Smart Lighting vs Smart lighting, I have the update one too. It seems to be working with sunset and sunrise. For the sake of fun/pain, I turned off Smart lighting and built rotines. I’ll see how they work tonight.

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My sunset/sunrise routines seem to be working with Smart lighting, but I do have an offset of +15 minutes applied, maybe that is the difference?

Using a routine worked fine yesterday. Lights turned on a 7:06 PM which is sunset here.

So for me, the Smart lighting option isn’t working, but routines are. I’m OK with that.

I didn’t delete Smart lighting, just disable. To test things out, I might play with it later and see if deleting the functionality and setting it up again works. But I’m satisfied for now.

Thanks for all the help.

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Smart lighting still isn’t updating sunset/sunrise. Well I guess it is right twice a year!
The time in the ide is not updating, which is the time smart lighting is using.

The time in IDE has been deprecated and is no longer updated. It is also not used with Smart lighting at this point. The recommendation is to move any Smart lighting rules that use Sunrise or Sunset over to Routines.

I reported an issue with Sunrise/Sunset times not updating in Rules about eighteen months or so ago. It was eventually found to be a repeatable problem in cloud executed Rules. It is still broken …

I’m not seeing a problem via Smart lighting or Rules.

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