Basic troubleshooting tips for scenes?

Community Playground Getting Started & Initial Setup
1

I’m a new (1 week old) VeraLite user. I previously had bad luck with X-10 (which my wife still vividly remembers) and now am starting to dabble with MiOS. So what happens? I created the most basic scene I can think of to replace my wife’s mechanical light timer… and it’s not working. Here’s the basic scene (see screenshots attached).

  1. 30 minutes after sunset turn-on the appliance module (happens to be the GE Outdoor Appliance Module, but currently indoors)
  2. Set a delay for 3 hours at which point the appliance module is supposed to turn off

30 minutes after sunset, the light turns on. We go to bed and in the morning the light is still on. I check my scene and all looks good. So I leave it, and the next night I get the same result. I don’t want to resort (yet) to creating a completely separate scene just to turn off the light, although I know that’s an option… it seems like this should just work.

How do I go about troubleshooting this scene? And if it helps, I did download the iOS app SimpleWave and it gives me a notification that the scene to turn the light on ran correctly, but no notice it ran after the 3 hour delay.

My basic question is this… how do I troubleshoot this? Please help, before my wife condemns z-wave to the same slow (and painful) death as x-10. Lol. Strangely enough, I’ve searched high and low and don’t see any basics on troubleshooting anywhere.

thanks!

2

Troubleshooting will require that you go through the log file to figure out what is happening. But, in this case I will save you the trouble and advise you not to use such a lengthy delay in a scene.

Scene delays can fail to execute when things happen, like Vera restarting due to error or nightly heal. There can also be issues if the date changes(midnight). For these reasons and more, I would not recommend a scene delay of more than a few minutes.

Instead, I would recommend two scenes, an On scene that triggers 35 minutes after sunset and an Off scene that triggers 3:35 after sunset. The two scenes thus become scheduled scenes rather than a delay or countdown timer.

If you find that you have other applications where only a lengthy countdown timer will do, then I would suggest that you look at the Program Logic Event Generator(PLEG) plugin.

3

Wouldn’t it be better just to schedule a discrete time to turn it off?
Of course I’m making an assumption but you’re using this light to get around before bedtime? Is your usual bedtime 3:35 after sunset, or do you usually make it to bed around a certain time of night?
I have a light I’m doing something similar with and it seemed to make more sense to me, to just turn it off around 30 minutes after what I figure is going to be the latest we would normally go to bed.

4

I will set a separate scene and test it out tonight. I understand why the long timer doesn’t work (Vera reset, no persistent variables, yadda yadda), but if it isn’t a concrete implementation than it probably shouldn’t be in the UI. If the UI allows me to choose “x hours” then it should work as it allows me to put that in. But I digress, and will create a second scene, and report back.

5

Use PLEG, PLTS, or Countdown plugin if you want persistent timers.

6

I seem to be having mixed results, still. Last night the light turned on 35 minutes after sunset, but then turned off 5 minutes later. It says it was because of a scene, but none of my scenes are set for 5 minutes (or 40 minutes after sunset).

I have the notifications on, but they only say when there is a status change. So are there instructions somewhere on how to read/access the log files? I tried to search but wiki.micasaverde.com is out of date, and too many ambiguous results appeared here.

7
So are there instructions somewhere on how to read/access the log files?

See Logs.

8

You could very easily have multiple instances of the same scene running.
i.e.
A single scene that starts on motion … Turns on a Light delays for 30 minutes and them turns off a Light.

Now if you have a motion at T1, say 11:00 PM, it will turn off the light at 11:30PM.
Now if you have a motion at T2, say 11:25 PM, it will turn the light on, but it’s already on, and off at 11:30 PM.
However the light will go off at 11:30 because of the scene start at T1
Same would happen if you manually turned the light out at 11:15, then manually turned it back on at 11:25.

PLEG, PLTS, and Countdown Timer plugins address these issues because they extend (re-trigger) their timers, and as I mentioned earlier. they persist across a Vera Restart.