Temporarily disable SmartLighting Automations?

I’m in the process of getting ready to move to a new house and slowly breaking down my current system. A pain point I’ve found is that I cannot just pause each individual Smart Lighting program. It’s either delete or run with it. Or, worse yet, all on or all off.

My solution so far is to have a virtual switch dictate whether each program should run. This is going to result in a bunch of virtual switches.
Does anyone else have a better, more efficient way?

Ideally, this will be a feature added in the new app at some point. Until then, it’s a ride on the struggle bus.

  1. go to the IDE https://account.smartthings.com and create a new mode called Paused
  2. go into your automation and create an exception to not run when location mode = paused.
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That works if the OP wants To turn off every smart lighting automation that has been assigned to that mode. But if you had, say, three different smart lighting automations and you wanted to disable different ones at different times, that approach would be way more complex than the virtual switches.

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I have a plethora of virtual switches for this purpose. But I definitely like @nathancu’s suggestion.

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I hadn’t thought of this and it is handy, but like @JDRoberts mentioned I will only want some off at a time. As I take out lights, such as my pergola and low voltage lighting, I want to disable it piece by piece.
You definitely gave me some ideas though. I may be able to make “stages” of my move into modes. Thanks for the idea!

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One option might be to consider using Automations in the new app. Those can be manually enabled/disabled from the Automations screen.

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Yeah, unfortunately these are already setup in Smart Lighting in order to keep them under local control. I have a few running cloud devices, so should switch those over to give me these options.

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