I found my problem and thanks to @orangebucket. His answer wasn’t exactly on target, but it was certainly in the ballpark and it got me to thinking. Apology now, this will be kind of a long post, but it may help someone else.
I migrated about a month ago. The routine and scene conversions were a little confusing but they were pretty much working, albeit a little on the slow side. The Alexa triggering ST was working pretty good, and the stuff within the ST platform was working as well. ST to Alexa with either virtual or physical contact switches were failing or taking upwards of an hour. On the other hand, the virtual momentary(button) switches were starting to be a crap shoot as to what the setting was.
I started having some really weird issues about two weeks after the @lars memo. I did find and solve one of my big issues today…not being able to set my STHM and or hub mode…see my prior post/example. I’d set it to away in an automation, and it “appeared” not to change. I could even set it manually, and it would change back.
Ok, I was using virtual buttons to trigger my different security settings, good morning, good night, arm, disarm, etc. What I found out, by process of elimination, was that somehow my automations were being triggered, without me touching any of the virtual buttons, but I think it was due to them? Also, it appears that the “disable” automation was always the last one to trigger, leaving the HUB/STHM in the “home/disarm” mode. The test scene as you can tell was very simple with no trigger being used that was in any of the normal scenes and automations. What I did finally see after trying to check it quickly, was that sometimes the setting would blink to AWAY, and then back to Home. As I told @orangebucket I have NO presence, motion, or timed automations. Everything was based on triggering a scene on Alexa or via the app to kick off the automation.
The fix was to go to a regular (2 function) virtual switch in the scene/automation trigger process. I set it on In the scene to trigger the automation and turn it off as the last action in the automation.
This works well with Alexa also as it can simply set an action to trigger the scene.
If ST can just get the ST to Alexa triggers to work, and in a timely manner I’ll be happy.
Again, sorry about the long post…hope it helps someone
TG