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The original was posted on /r/homeassistant by /u/TrousersCalledDave on 2025-04-15 20:36:25+00:00.
I just thought it might be fun, inspiring, or even helpful to share those times where you've had an automation that just wouldn't work as intended and the moment of glee when the reason/solution pops into your head. This is inspired by me finally fixing an automation after 3 months!
I'll cut to the chase and include only the salient parts of the automation (in Node Red).
At sunset, switch on kitchen lights, full brightness. There's a PIR sensor connected to a delay trigger node. This node waits 10 minutes before calling further action. If anyone steps into the kitchen during these 10 minutes, the countdown is reset meaning the lights will never dim when there's kitchen activity. If the countdown reaches 0, i.e. no one has been in the kitchen for 10 minutes, I then transition one of the 2 bulbs to off, and the other to 25% over the period of about 5 minutes, to save electricity. If the PIR gets triggered during the transition it calls a scene setting them both back to 100%.
This all works great. When fully transitioned the kitchen is dim but still bright enough to step into and see where you're going until the bright scene kicks back in.
At the end of the evening the lights turn off either via a ZigBee button, or if it's 2AM and the downstairs TV isn't on. When you press the ZigBee button you see the kitchen lights switch off.
However, without fail when I went downstairs in the night or the next morning, one of the bulbs was always on, at 25%! I couldn't figure out why so I ended up just firing off a few time events - at 3AM, 4AM, 5AM, 6AM, if kitchen group is on, turn off. It worked but didn't address why it was happening.
My flow was as follows:
Kitchen PIR ON > If ceiling lights ON > Get brightness > If both not 100%, call bright scene > Otherwise set 10 minute delay trigger (or retrigger) > Start light transitions when/if delay reaches 0.
I was adamant that something else was triggering the light to turn on. Afterall my automation checks IF CEILING GROUP LIGHTS ARE ON. When I press the button, I see both lights turning off! Therefore the next time the PIR is triggered, the condition is false, it shouldn't switch the lights back on.
Then it finally dawned on me... Even though the lights are off, I'm still inside an active loop! That is, the PIR will no longer trigger the automation, but it's still going to wait for 10 minutes and then call the light transition (which uses light.turn_on). So the light is ALWAYS turning on 10 minutes after I switched it off before bed. One transitioned to off, the other to 25%.
So the simple solution was - check the state of the light group again before calling the transition! It seemed counterintuitive to me since I just checked their state in a previous node, which is why I missed it so many times! Now I'm aware of the issue I could make the automation more efficient by also stopping the trigger counting down as it's then unnecessary.
Tl;dr:
I just wanted to share my experiences with a troublesome automation and how I solved it, and if others had stories to share. Also, if you can't figure out why lights or other devices might be turning on when not intended, CHECK ANY DELAYS OR LOOPS in the automation, they might still be running after you've stopped an event triggering the automation!
