Time based automation not working, history, not working...what's going on?

Folks, I’m not new to SmartThings, but am new to trying to use the community and SmartThings support.

I am trying to get a SmartThings automation to work. I have a couple of electric heaters attached to z-wave appliance switches and an ecobee thermostat with several accompanying sensors. One room (my office) is not heated by the house heater, so I use the ecobee temperature sensor to turn on the heater when the room is below 66F, and turn off if above 68F. Overnight I lower the heating setpoint to 55F, but the 66F automation is supposed to start at 4am. But the automation does not trigger at 4am, and I’m trying to figure out why.

During diagnosing I noticed that the history tab no longer works. Support has told me that it is a known issue, but the problem is not reported on status.smartthings.com. Are others seeing the same problem?

I can’t really tell why the automation doesn’t work. Is there no way to record when an automation is triggered? As you can see by the screenshots, the heater did not turn on in the morning until I manually did so via the SmartThings app.

It seems rather odd that this relatively simple automation would not work. What am I missing?

SmartThings uses “event” based triggering of Automations. What this means is that the device in the IF condition has to change state for the Automation to be evaluated. So if the Mike Office Temp changed between 4AM and 9:30PM and it was below 66 then it would trigger the Heater to turn on. So if the sensor reported that temperature change at say 8am then that’s when the Automation would be triggered.

@RBoy thanks for the response. Indeed. I uploaded the temperature events screenshot as well. Sensor reported temperature change at 5:35am at 62F (change from 63F) but it did not trigger the automation.

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Thanks @jkp for the confirmation

I’m wondering if the Automation is actually implementing a ‘falls below’ type condition rather than ‘less than’.

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@orangebucket good question…I’ll add an automation to “turn on heater at 4am” and see if that helps.

It really isn’t clear to me how ST handles states vs. events. For example, the automation seems to be triggered by the ‘event’ of a temperature sensor read, which happens every 1/2 hour or so (not sure what defines that frequency) as history shows, upon which it must be evaluating the temperature AND time condition ‘between 4am and 9:30pm’. If it is evaluating a “falls below” idea then it would need to be aware of the prior temperature sensor read. I guess I could try and create a virtual switch that acts like a state memory for above/below 66F, and then another automation for reading the status of that switch for turning on/off the heater. I’m hoping that the wisdom of this community would point me in the most practical direction.

The History (had it not been playing up on iOS) shows when Automations are ‘activated’, meaning when the actions are run. What you don’t get a feel for is when they are running but not activating the payload.

It would either need to check what the prior value was or to maintain a boolean state.

I’ve never been fond of the Automations as it just isn’t clear what logic is being implemented. They could do with a help text.

Thanks. Appreciate the insight. It’s really too bad to see this kind of regression in product support. I’ll start looking at other options for automation.

Global History has been broken for quite a while. I’ve tried help tickets several times and each time it will work for a day and die again. As you’ve found, It makes debugging a real problem when things aren’t working. One thing I do is add a push notification to each automation. At least I can see in Messages when the automation runs. Then I have to go into individual device’s history to check other relate states. Far from optimal but it helps a little.