Hello, brand new to Homey here (my Homey Pro arrived today), so I’m assuming this might be a very stupid question, sorry, but… is Homey really this complicated to set a simple schedule?
The situation is this: I have a device plugged into a Hue Smart plug. Specifically a pump in my garden pond. On weekdays I want it to power on between 7 and 22 hours. During the weekend it should start an hour later.
In the Philips Hue app I had made two simple automations, one for weekdays and one for the weekend, with a simple start and end time, and the days selected. See the 2 screenshots included.
I’d like to transfer these automations to Homey flows, but I’m frankly baffled by how complicated this seems. Do I really need to create 3 flows, or am I completely missing something?
WHEN the time is 7h, AND it’s a weekday, activate the plug.
WHEN the time is 8h, AND it’s weekend, activate the plug.
WHEN the time is 22h, deactivate the plug.
What I had expected to see, something simple like:
WHEN it’s a weekday, run between 7h and 22h, ELSE run between 8h and 22h.
Can the WHEN condition only check the time, but not the day of the week?
If I really need a multitude of flows for scheduling my devices during the week, then I expect if to become a mess quite soon… What am I doing wrong here? Should I just keep the simple Hue automations for my lights and plugs?
Thanks for the quick response, Theo. Unfortunately I can’t find that card under the “WHEN” section. Should it be under ‘Date & Time’ or somewhere else?
At what time would a “Every 1 day” trigger?
What happens when I manually shut the plug down with the Hue app? Does it turn on 1 second later, because it’s continuously running this flow?
Hmm, I feel like there should be a manual to read somewhere for basics like this…
and another option, there are several apps that can also do pretty easily what you want, even though it will probably still give you multiple regular flows, or just start with Advanced Flows of course. Action Scheduler Advanced Scheduler Cron
Thanks Dijker for taking the screenshots! So I guess it is as cumbersome as I thought… And if the weekend end time would be 23h, I would need 4 flows, while the Hue app takes only 2 extremely simple automations… There isn’t a simple “from 7 am to 22 pm” scheduling card with Homey?
What is the event that would trigger the “An Alarm Goes Off”-card? It feels like I’m asking very basic questions, sorry.
Homey is a different way of thinking then “usual”, flows are very easy to create, so technically also easy to create such a function, but also gives you full control over all conditions you might want, like “when xx is home” so it only activates when you are home, or the exact opposite.
You just have to find a default way to separate your flows into folders so it will keep easy to find, before my migration to the new Homey Pro (early 2023), I had over 700 flows which were still easy to manage because of how it was managed in folders.
Now with advanced flows I “only” have 168.
Aaaaah… alarm as in ‘wekkers’, I thought it involved motion sensors
I didn’t even know I could set an alarm (clock) in the app, I see it’s under ‘More’…
Blog-post says: “Alarms go off by default by a sound and message that your alarm just went off. But honestly, they get really interesting when combined with a Flow.”
Hmm, when used like this they should of course be silent ‘alarms’ (on my phone). I can’t find the ‘alert’ settings for alarms, am I missing something?
Well, first day with the Homey, and I managed to delete my old Hue integration with Alexa and transfer it all to Homey → Alexa. It seems I can succesfully control the lights (and even Hue scenes) by voice.
I see Homey also supports my Remootio gate and garage door openers, I will try that tomorrow.
And tomorrow morning I will hear if the Homey app for BlueOS wakes me up correctly
Roon integration is still tricky it seems, only some old github project.
Thanks fantross, I didn’t know you could combine multiple WHEN-triggers in 1 flow. That certainly reduces the amount of flows needed! And I assume once you’ve got one of these flows set up correctly, it can be duplicated to other devices as well, so you don’t have to reinvent the wheel everytime
Right now I’m testing the ‘Advanced Scheduler App’, see how that works. Looks a bit more complicated, having to set up tags etc, but in case there are multiple on/off moments during the day, it’s maybe simpler than drawing flows.
