Mark lamp as "Don't turn me off"

Hi! I just thought of something. Is it possible in some way to mark one or more lamps as temporarily “detached” from any flow. It may sound complicated but sometimes I want to turn on a certain light bulb and don’t let them turn off by any “good night”, “leaving home” or “inactive zone”. The “turn off all lamps” in an entire room or even entire home is great but it would be nice to have “turn off all lights except …”. If we have that maybe this could be achieved with variables or such.

Thanks
Christian

Not a real solution perhaps, but…
If the lamp is connected by a smart plug you might be able to mark it as “always on” in advanced device settings.


(dutch language setting)

But you have to enable/disable it by hand. I see no possibilities to do this by a flow i.e.

Hi,

For me the best solution was first to decide when I wanted to turn all the lights off and when I wanted to keep some on.
With this in mind try to find which conditions or triggers you can use for each situation.
Then put these in two different flows, one to turn all lights off and one to leave some lights on.
For all lights you can indeed use “turn all lamps off” for the other one just select all the lights you want to turn off seperately and use the card to turn them off.

For me it works like a charm.

Interesting! Would you mind sharing your flows for a better visualization?

/Christian

Instead of switching those lights directly in flows, you could create flows to turn a particular light on or off, and call those from your scene flow. In the on/off flow for a specific light you can then test on a boolean logic variable. Or you could just turn the flow itself on or off (I recommend the latter, as you can see that the flow is disabled at first glance)

1 Like

Hi,

Of course I can share.
Small difference is that I use it for turning lights on.
And I made different flows which are started by other flows for the lights. So when I want to change something, I only want to do it one time.
Here are some small examples.

And

Hope this will give you some ideas :bulb:

Potentially I do not fully get the question, but I use for each room a different variable. For example a variable name “Living Room Light on”. Whenever a flow from Homey tries to turn lights off then it must check if this variable is stating yes, if so then Homey is allowed to turn the lights off otherwise skip.

So when I turn on a light manually this variable is not set to yes, and when Homey turns on a light it does set this variable to yes, and no when homey turns on the lights. In the flow that turns on lights you simply add a check that it should only execute if some or maybe all lights are already on.

Let me know if this makes sense, otherwise I can post some screen shots of an example.

This would indeed be easier to control the lights. For example: the lights in the driveway shouldn’t go off when you make a flow that turns all lights off. You can then select all zones where they should go off but it would be much easier if we can just say “turn all lights off except this zone or this light”

From my side one idea for current problem: There is a “switch” for flows to. It’s possible to disable a flow. So, may-be to group the lights into different flows, and the special-handling lights are in flow, which one is then enabled or disabled.

Another just an idea: IF the devices (lights) have a (user defined, multiple) tags, then it’s quite easy in script select all devices with specific tag and manage (only)them. For example:

  • switchOffAll(“night-home-empty”)
  • switchOffAll(“night-home-somesleeper”)

PS. Additional pluss is the easy-to-manage. When adding/removing/resetting device it’s not required to check all flows, but just add a tag(s) to new device. Also, if “someone is lost”, then there is no command for him.

Agreed!
I do it a bit “dirty”:
If…
Blah
Then…
Turn off all lights
And then…
Turn on zone Y and Z after 1s
(Or: turn on Lamp Y and Z after 1s).

“And then” :sweat_smile:

Whats the fun?

That’s another flow right?

No. I just meant this with:
Then…
blah
And then…
blah