I built a Homey Flow that used to work just fine. The concept was that I have some plant bulbs that I use to augment natural light in a couple of places around the house. For the ones near the bedroom, I have them triggered to come on at sunrise so they don’t wake me up before the sun.
For the ones elsewhere in the house, my goal was to run the lights for 12 hours (720 minutes) but to ensure that they shut OFF at sunset.
So, I initially built a Flow with a When condition of “The sun sets in 720 minutes” that turns on the lights and flips a variable for use in other flows, then keeps the lights on for 720 minutes…effectively turning them off at sunset.
What’s confusing me is that Flow worked perfectly for over a week, then just stopped triggering. I put in timeline posts to tag completion and error handling timeline posts in case things went wrong. But none of that works…because the When condition no longer triggers.
Do I just need to rebuild because the flow somehow is corrupted, or did I miss some recent change that intentionally broke it? Or, was I just lucky and this is the worst way to build a flow that runs plant bulbs for 12 hours and turns them off at local sunset?
and I’d suggest to report your issue also to Athom: Support | Homey
What I don’t get is the use of a 720 minute delay to get the lights to turn off at sunset, while there are WHEN “the sun sets” cards as well?
Also the days almost never have the same length, using a “sun set” card seems more logic?
Thanks for the heads up on the other app. I’ll submit feedback to Athom as well.
Good question on the lighting.
These houseplants are tropical so they need about 12 hours of light. The lights are pretty bright too.
Upstairs they come on with sunrise because the house is starting to brighten so they don’t wake us up by coming on when it’s otherwise dark out.
Downstairs we turn them off at sunset because they’re too bright if you’re winding down and watching TV or something.
Before Homey Pro we turned everything on at sunrise and just lived with the extra light in the evening. When the new flow was working it really made evening activities more relaxing!
The use case is clear for me, also the flow. However, my latest information is that a maximum offset of 60 minutes is possible with the Build-In Sun Flow cards. With the Sun Events app it should be 120 minutes. But I have only read this information, never tested it myself. That’s why I’m surprised that Flow worked for a while.
@Peter_Kawa, do you have any other information about the max. offset time?
Hi Dirk, the Sun Events event triggers accepts offset values of -60 minimum to max. 60 minutes.
On a Pro 2019 the onboard sun triggers can have an offset up to 120 minutes.
Yesterday tried it with the Build-In Flow card The sun sets in with 120 minutes offset and it worked (HP23).
Today I will try it again with 4 h (normal flow) and 3 h (advanced flow).
So yesterday it worked again? What have you done? Created a new flow?
I “doubled up” my When conditions based on Peter’s advice to check out the Sun Events app and saw the flow resume operations.
I have now deleted the built-in Date & Time trigger and am using only the Sun Events trigger. I’ll report back in a few days to let you know if the positive change in flow behavior was the result of adding in the Sun Events trigger. If the flow runs seamlessly for a week, I’ll swap back in the Date & Time trigger to validate which trigger is truly operational with a -720 offset.
(Normal Flow)