Help with scenarios

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fable
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Help with scenarios

Post by fable » Tue 17 Dec 2013, 21:13

I have a temperature sensor and motion sensor in my home office along with a Nexa powerswitch coupled with a fan.

I've struggled quite a bit to set this up properly.

What I want it to do:
When temperature is over 23C and motion sensor is OFF start the fan. In other words - I don't want a noisy fan running when I'm in my home office.

So I have 3 scenarios:
#1 Fan On (Low pri): Over Temp 23C and Motion sensor OFF
#2 Fan off: Temp below 23C
#3 Fan off (High pri): Temp above 23C and Motion sensor is ON. Rule setting for motion sensor: Min fulfilled 5 minutes.

Now the problem is: Scenario #3 turns it off, but no matter what I do I cannot prevent scenario #1 from turning on every time the motion sensor switches to "off" (for a few seconds). Which means the fan switches on and off on and drives me crazy.

How do I stop Scenario #1 from triggering all the time?

Any help appreciated.

Martin
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Re: Help with scenarios

Post by Martin » Tue 17 Dec 2013, 21:22

Scenarios are somewhat limited when trying to accomplish what you want to do.

You can reach the same functionality by using group schedules connected to rules in pretty much the same way you do when connecting rules to scenarios. This way, you will also have the possibility to use scenarios for other functionality.

So, basically, what you can do with group schedules is to set up a single group schedule and link it to a rule saying that the schedule should be active when temperature is above 23 degrees and the motion sensor is off.

If you want to force your fan to run even though you are in the office you can have a separate scenario that you activate manually.

The "minimum fulfilled" option is an option to guarantee that a device is kept on after a specific rule has triggered an activation and then stays on for the time specified by the "minimum fulfilled" time.
Martin | Switch King

fable
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Re: Help with scenarios

Post by fable » Tue 17 Dec 2013, 22:53

Appreciate the feedback :)

But as you said that is just a different way of doing almost the same thing. I tried using Eventghost as well, but I couldn't see if it supported temperatures. It looked it only registered like only "on/off" and not temperatures.

Are there no applications that can handle this?

Martin
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Re: Help with scenarios

Post by Martin » Tue 17 Dec 2013, 23:41

Not sure what you mean by the EG-part...

The one of the big differences with using group schedules instead of scenarios is that you can have multiple group schedules active at the same time while only a single scenario can be active at any given time. So - if possible, go for group schedules instead of scenarios.
Martin | Switch King

fable
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Re: Help with scenarios

Post by fable » Wed 18 Dec 2013, 00:02

Very good tip, Martin!

The way I have used SK now is not relying on a scenario to be active. One scenario for on and one for off. I don't really understand when you need a scenario to run all the time?

In EG I don't see the temperature in the "log" on the left side. I have no idea how to create temperature-based events.

Martin
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Re: Help with scenarios

Post by Martin » Wed 18 Dec 2013, 08:07

The original idea about scenarios was to be able to set a collection to a defined state during a limited period of time - like "Party mode" (which at least at our house happens, but not every day... ;)).

When the functionality to start a scenario when a given rule was fulfilled was implemented, we needed a way to prioritize which scenairo that would kick in if more than one rule was fulfilled; hence the low, normal and high priority. A big drawback, due to the complexity of scenarios, is that you cannot define that a scenario should end when a given rule is NOT fulfilled. This makes it troublesome in situations like yours when you are really not in need of the priorities - you'd actually just want to switch between scenarios when a rule is not fulfilled anymore but Switch King currently does not support that.

As it sounds, you want to control your fan (turn on and off) quite frequently based on certain criterias and by using group schedules you can get around the issues with scenarios.

As an example of a group schedule connected to rules, I take my spotlights that lights up the driveway and the front of the house. To these, I have two group schedules connected.
One group says "Dim 20% between 06:30 and 23:30 when the sun is down". The other group schedule is connected to my motion detector, saying "Dim 100% between 04:00 and 02:00 if movement is detected". When linking these two schedules to my spotlights, they are turned on at 20% between 06:30 and 23:30 but dims up to 100% when the detector is triggered and goes back to 20% after the object triggering the detector has disappeard.
Martin | Switch King

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