Hey everyone! I’ve been getting into HA lately and have been trying to setup scene controllers in my house to help manage all of the lights I have. When I first envisioned this, I imagined I could set various lighting modes, like “lights on”, “lights off”, “dinner”, “movie”, “relaxing with friends”, etc… The idea was I’d select a mode and lighting would switch to the correct configuration and there would be no concept of “active” or otherwise.
Now that I have my scene controller setup (when I can actually get it to work; I’ve had lots of issues with my scene controller and vera), this isn’t at all the behavior I’m getting. The concept of active and inactive scenes is almost certainly helpful in certain scenarios, but it frustrates almost everything I attempt to do. For example, if I enable a “lights on” scene as I prep to watch a movie, then use my “movie mode” scene while I watch it, I can’t simply turn all of the lights back on with the “lights on” scene when I’m done. I have to turn them all off, then back on, since the “lights on” scene was still “active” while I watched my movie, even though the “movie mode” scene turned most of them off.
These sorts of things are minor, but they don’t seem like something I should have to do, either. Is this a fundamental issue with scenes and I just need to change how I think about them? Is there some clever way of solving the problem (like adding lua code to disable other scenes automatically)? Or are my scene’s not behaving correctly (should “lights on” go inactive when I enable “movie mode”, since most of the associated lights are off)?
Thanks for any help! This is my first post to these forums, so let me know if I should be posting elsewhere, searching harder, etc…
Worth noting, I see in the “advanced” tab for scenes, you can adjust the “Scene is ‘active’” behavior, so it seems like scenes should deactive automatically. They just… don’t. But I’m really not sure if I’m misunderstanding something or if this is an actual issue.
my scenes don’t have active or inactive or anything, I’m new to this too but for me when I press a button on my controller, it runs a scene, which is just a collection of light levels. And then when I run another scene, it does the same, then i run the All Off scene and it turns all the lights off. Never had to deal with active or inactive
My scene controller definitely tracks when scenes are on or off, and UI7 can’t seem to make up its mind. Some parts of it hint at the concept of active/inactive (e.g. the setting for controlling when a scene stops being considered active, which don’t seem to work), while others seem to hint otherwise (e.g. the ‘run’ button for scenes, which turns green for a moment before going away).
Some posts talk about scenes like they work one way, while others act like they work the other. I’ve found a depressing amount of conflicting or general non-information on the topic, and none of the posts I’ve found give a real description of how scenes are “supposed” to work in the vera ecosystem. Honestly, I’d be happy going either way, but I can’t get Vera and my scene controllers to play nicely together in this regard. My scene controller really wants active/inactive behavior and Vera, despite various settings that hint to its support, won’t properly supply it.
Hi @loch, I understand your issue. I’m not familiar with the scene controller that you have, but I suspect it’s similar to the Leviton scene controller. And the scene controller does seem to track whether the scene is active before it can deactivate it. I know it’s too late now, bit of you search the forum on the difference between the Leviton scene controller vs zone controller, you’ll find that the zone controller is more flexible as it let’s you define scenes that will be run when each button is turned on and turned off. Perhaps you can see whether you can use the scene controller as a trigger to scenes rather than assigning the scenes to the controller?
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