How do I add a cool down to an automation? (lemmy.today)

submitted 11 months ago by Buelldozer@lemmy.today to c/homeassistant@lemmy.world

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I have an automation that turns my driveway lights on when motion is detected. It normally works fairly well but it was windy last night and that caused the automation to trip endlessly as my trees and bushes were whipping around. Lights would come on, shut off 10 minutes later, then turn right back on again. It basically did this all night until I disabled the automation.

I'll do some fine tuning of the motion sensors which will help and I'm considering adding a condition to the automation where it won't trip if the wind speed is above a certain level but how can I add some kind of cool down timer to the automation to prevent it from endlessly engaging?

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[-] Bishma@discuss.tchncs.de 10 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

There may be a more straight forward way to do it now, but the traditional way is to add a condition to the automation based on the automation's (or maybe the light or motion detector) last_triggered property. You need, AFAIK, to use a template for this.

A condition with something like this should make it so it can't fire more than once every hour (60 seconds times 60 minutes): {{ (as_timestamp(now()) - as_timestamp(state_attr('automation.driveway','last_triggered'))) > 60 * 60 }}

[-] Buelldozer@lemmy.today 4 points 11 months ago

Nice idea! It appears that this can now be done directly in the automation too.

Of course that leads to a problem where it will only trigger once an hour no matter what, which may cause a different frustration.

I'm starting to think that the best answer may be to re-position the motion sensor so that it cannot see my landscaping whipping around in the wind.

this post was submitted on 14 Nov 2023

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