So I have an ADC rule - when front door opens, between hours 4-midnight, turn kitchen light on for 8 hours. (I had it for 30 minutes or whatever - but made it 8 hoping it would fix it - it didn’t)…
The recipe is:
When sensor activity: front door activates
During these time frames: schedule
Perform: turn on selected devices for 8 hours before turning off. (kitchen lights)
What happens - door opens, light goes on… door closes, light goes off. HUH?
Any suggestions?
I see that your Front Door sensor looks like it’s being treated as a motion sensor instead of a contact by the emPower rules. Notice that in “When this event occurs:” instead of seeing the “Opens/Closes” dropdown it just says “Activates” like it would for a motion detector. I suspect this might be the problem. We’re looking into it and we’ll be in touch.
As a troubleshooting step could you try creating two rules? The first rule will turn the light on and leave it on indefinitely based on the front door opening, and the second rule will be to turn the light off at a specific time. This would be for testing purposes and we would like to know how his rules respond to this different setup.
Hi Ryan, Just put the rules in. Am going to go trigger the on event with the door now and see if it shuts off at 1pm as scheduled. Will report back.
That worked as expected. Light went on and stayed on until the timer to kill it triggered it off. What’s next steps?
Hmmm. I suspect something is fishy with the way either ADC or 2GIG is storing information about that sensor. It looks like this - which is normal for motion sensors
but I would expect it to look like this since it’s a contact.
Do you mind if we try remotely deleting and re-adding that sensor to your system? You will have to leave your system disarmed while we do it but it shouldn’t take long. After that I’ll need you to recreate the rule and we’ll turn on some additional diagnostics in case it’s still having the issue.
Sure - go ahead and let me know when to change the rule and how.
Deleting and re-adding initially did not help but deleting and re-adding it as a different sensor number did help. So now your Front Door is sensor 20 instead of sensor 1 and it does show up as a contact in emPower rules. Delete your Front Door Entry rule, wait 5 minutes and then create a new Front Door Entry rule using the new Front Door sensor (20). Let me know when you’ve done this and we’ll turn in the extra diagnostics just in case.
Done - so far so good, we’ll see how it holds up - I set it for an hour to test the off action. Very strange though how you had to deal with removing sensor from #1 and add to #20 - sounds like a firmware bug in the panel. Thanks Ryan for the help.
Is there any news on their new panel or is that dead in the water at this point?
Didn’t fully work. Tonight… light was on in kitchen. Opened front door and was there with door open about 5 minutes. Closed it, went back to kitchen and lights were off when I got there. There is definitely a bug in there somewhere. What’s next?
We’ll have to get help from Alarm.com so we’ll pick it up during business hours. Do you have have ballpark estimates of about when you did what you described above so we can look for it in the event history?
Can you confirm… With the old rule, before we changed the sensor number, the lights would turn on when the door opened but they wouldn’t turn back off after the alloted time. With the new rule, after changing Front Door to sensor 20, the lights won’t even turn on when you open the door. Is this all correct?
Ballpark - last night around 6pm CT tested again. Light went on, closed door, walked back and light went off.
With old rule - lights would do same thing. Open front door, lights come on, close door, lights go off.
Basically it’s right back to where it was, albeit now on sensor 20.
Going over this in detail with Alarm.com. By chance could you create an additional rule, identical to the intended Front door rule, but using a different door sensor? Does this new rule operate as expected?
That already exists - the back door rule to turn on back door hall light for 3 minutes on entry. It’s the same contact type too.
That one has never misbehaved.
We specifically would want to see how a new rule behaves.
I wouldn’t make any changes to existing rules, just create a new one which turns on a light when a sensor opens (can be a different door or even window) and the light remains on for 1 hour. Then test the new rule.
No - my point was the rule existed - didn’t need to modify or create it.
I made rule “front door lighting” as well as “back door entry” at the same time. Same exact structure - same sensor (door sensor) - same action - turn on light for X time.
In this case, the front door rule was controlling kitchen light (leviton zwave) vs back door controlling hall light (jasco switch). So that may be the difference - the on/off command being sent. Does the panel send a discrete on and discrete off - or does it send a “power” command? I assume discrete.
In any case, I just created a rule to test kitchen lights with another source. Will test now - it’s set for 1 hour, I’ll go check on it in 55 minutes if it doesn’t go off right away. It’s called test rule for lights.
Thanks for testing, I just want us to rule out an issue with new rule creation in general. Having the light turn off when the sensor closes again is an option in the rule creation, but not what you have selected, almost as though that specific combination of sensor/light/rule gets sent the wrong variables. So we would need a rule created after everything you currently have.
Does the panel send a discrete on and discrete off – or does it send a “power” command? I assume discrete.
There is no Z-wave protocol command to “Toggle,” a dedicated “On” command is sent or a dedicated “Off” command is sent. If the device is already on and a rule would turn it on, nothing further happens when the rule triggers.
Ok - finished the test using that kitchen test rule - that worked. Stayed on for an hour.
My next guess is that the sensor itself is faulty and reporting something other than open/close. Back to you gang.
We’d like to track one more time as you delete and recreate the affected rule.
Can you delete the Front door rule. Wait at least 5 minutes. Then recreate the rule.
FYI - won’t be able to mess with this until tomorrow but will do.