I have a Harmony Hub that has an activity defined to turn on my TV, Reciever, Soundbar and FireTV. Occasionally, when turning the activity off, the TV doesn’t actually go off, but because the activity also turns off the receiver, the tv screen is black so the person who performed the activity assumes the TV is off. I have Harmony integrated with ST, and the TV is plugged into an ST controllable outlet on my Zooz Zen20 power strip.
I’d like to figure out a way to automatically turn off the TV if the Harmony activity failed to do it. It doesn’t have to catch it immediately. I just want to prevent the TV from being left on for hours.
Unfortunately the Zooz Zen20 power strip doesn’t monitor power consumption.
So far, it looks like I might be able to create a webcore piston that would
always reset the outlet if the harmony activity switches to Off, and none
of my other harmony activites that involve the TV are currently On.
I don’t have Harmony remote experience but do with another brand. Does the harmony programming allow you to order the actions and can you put in pauses? I had to do this where I would turn off a certain device first and put a 3 second pause to make sure it has time to turn off. This was important with DVD players as an example to stop play before tuning off.
@TylerDurden - I know we don’t have the same hardware, but this is how I do it.
Harmony Hub
Lowes Iris Outlet
Ignore the motion sensor, forgot I had that in there. It doesn’t do anything with this piston.
I had to figure out that all of the stuff plugged into my power outlet used more than 195 watts when watching content (netflix, plex, … --> all on my roku) I don’t have cable. When you hit pause the tv will eventually lower the power it uses and the total power will drop below 195w. It depends on the app I’m using, but 195w seemed like a good cut off point.
FYI - The “activity” variable is the harmony activity on ST.
I am not sure, but many new TVs require power 24/7 to maintain settings. So when you press the remote power button it really goes into sleep mode, keeping all settings. But I could be wrong.
I do something like this and find HDMI CEC loses connection when everything is powered off completely. Not sure if it’s caused by the receiver, TV, or both. If you use a multi function remote it doesn’t really matter because it’s turning on and setting inputs anyway. I’ve been trying to use the included remote for the voice search so it’s kind of a pain when CEC is broken.
I have some logic to tell when we all go to bed for the night. 100% reliable. When we go to bed for the night it turns everything off that doesn’t need to be running including 4 large TVs. I cut about 300 watts of idle power usage while we are sleeping.
Some say it’s not good for the TVs, I say I haven’t seen any real evidence of it.
My TV which is almost 10 years old has a feature that if no input is detected for about 10 minutes it will shut off, I would say check your TV menu settings for something like this.
I would also look at your delay settings in the Harmony app, maybe increasing the inter-device delay will prevent this from happening.
Checking the TV settings is a great idea. I haven’t had a chance to
troubleshoot what causes the TV not to turn off. I guess it could be a
timing issue. What’s strange is that this happens to my wife more often
than me, and I probably use the TV more than her. I almost always use
Alexa and she always uses the harmony remote. I want to say if Alexa fails
to turn off the TV it can be traced back to the remote being used to start
the activity. Or I could just imagining that trend.
