Flow not starting on time

Questions & Help
1

I have a device that needs to be switched on at 19:30 every day, it is then switched off by a Google voice-activated routine some time later.

The first time I set up the flow the device is turned on at the required time, it is then showing as off in Homey when the Google routine is run.

The next time the flow should run it doesn’t and the device remains turned on until manually started. The log for the device shows nothing after the previous Google command to turn it off.

I found a previous question from 2021 talking about date and time formats but if the format is the problem that doesn’t explain why it runs the first time.

I’ve checked the system information and date and time are showing correctly for my location.

Any ideas

Stephen

2

Do you have any conditions set? Can you share your entire Flow (screenshot maybe)?

3

If you have advanced flows you can also add a crd that triggers when the device fails to switch.

That way youcan see if its your flow or the device

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4

Show your flow :grinning_face_with_smiling_eyes:

5

Here you go

Screenshot 2026-06-01 101704
Screenshot 2026-06-01 1017041288×143 19.5 KB

6

Add a message card directly after the WHEN card to see if your flow runs or something goes wrong with the card “turn on”.

7

Next to adding any notification card, you can add a time trigger a minute from now, to see if Homey time is still correct

8

As suggested, I added a message tab to the flow.

The start time has come and gone, and the flow did not start.

As to the time format, I used the clock on the card to set the time.

Stephen

9

I’ve also added a second flow with a timed start and that fired on time

10

Sometimes you’ll need to re-create a flow as new flow, and bin the original one.
Unfortunately there’s no way to find out what exactly was wrong with it.

11

I’ve already created a new flow for this task and had the same problem and also switched from a standard flow to an advanced one with the problem.

12

I think you’d reset the internal clock.

@ mobile app

  1. Go to Settings > Location
  2. Move the map, to have the pointer point to anywhere in an other timezone.
  3. Go to https://tools.developer.homey.app/tools/system to check if date reflects GMT / UTC time, and if dateHuman & timezone are reflecting the new time & timezone correctly
  4. If so, you can move the map back, to set the pointer’s position to Homey’s location again.
  5. Run the checks of ‘3.’ again
  6. If all’s reflecting your current time & timezone, the internal clock is reset.
13

I’ll try to move my location later when I have more time but something occurred to me last night.

Is it possible that Homey is treating this as a one-off alarm? It’s consistent with the behaviour I’m seeing. Also, if you think about the other alarms you might set; clock, the schedule for my robovac and my sleep alarm, all of them treat a time on it’s own as a one-off alarm; it is only when you add the days you want it to fire that they become recurring alarms.

Stephen

14

Could be, but I’m unaware of any changes in this behaviour.
Without conditions, it should run at the hour it’s set to, any day.

I just made a test flow to monitor this. Both cards started the log card.

Screenshot from 2026-06-02 16-44-03
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I’ll let it continue to log the daily time trigger for the time being.

Did you already add notification cards, like Simple Log cards as shown, to rule out issues with the device you want to control?

15

As your example screenshot @Stephen_Petitt only has a single trigger, no conditions, and only a single action, have you tried creating this in a basic flow?

Have you tried using the built in Timeline notification to let you know when the flow tries to action, but fails to turn on your device? For example:

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Have you tried using this alternate Date & Time when card, and specifying the days?

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And if that fails also, just as a test, you could try setting an Alarm for the time on the days you want, then try using the Alarms card to trigger your device turn on…

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16

I’m using London time which now has British Summer time/

Develop System is showing the date/time as

“2026-06-03T00:55:41.485Z”

and human time as

“Wednesday 3rd June 2026 01:56:46”

Both are correct for the London location.

Moving my location to New York, The timezone has changed but I am still showing London time for DateHuman and system date/time. Not sure what I am doing wrong. Could it be because I am running a Self-Hosted Server in a VMware machine under Windows 11.

Moving back to London and the timezone resets date/time are still unaffected.

Stephen

17

Drako

Yes, I have tried both a standard (basic) flow and an advanced one.

Yes, I’ve added notifications to the flows. The time-based flow I set up on Sunday fired on Monday (first occurrence) but did not fire today.

I set up a time/date based flow yesterday, it fired this evening I’ll have to wait until tomorrow to see if it does again.

I haven’t tried an alarm card yet, will see what happens with the time/date one first.

Thanks for your help

Stephen

18

Have you checked that the system time of your VM matches the current date and time of your Homey SHS? (Homey Flows should be working with the Homey location and time zone, but if the VM has different time zone and time it could throw things a bit wonky)

19

Good point. I’d expect the Homey SHS internal time service to sync with the same timeservers as the other Homey models do.
But maybe HSHS syncs with the host’s clock?
I’ll ask @ Slack about this.

20

When the timezone actually changed, and changed back later on, one would expect the clock to be reset.
It’s odd the DateHuman did not change to NY time.
Possibly you’d wait a little longer / refresh the developer site a few times?

NB
Today all time triggers in my test flow fired, like they did yesterday.
I’ll keep an eye out.