Electric outage

#1

1) Give a description of the problem
Newbie is in the house :)))
Where I live (Hawaii) Electric outage is more common than mainland. Everytime electric goes out and comes back, all the light bulbs (around 50) are back to factory default and all of them are ON regardless of how they were before. So we end up getting all the lights ON in the middle of the night if electric outage happened.

2) What is the expected behavior?
I am thinking about a piston that records device status every 2 minutes, maybe detects outage and as soon as the outage is over, sets everything up back to how they were before the outage. Or any other way I can’t think of.

3) What is happening/not happening?
So far what happens is, I get up in the middle of the night, turn off the lights manually, get back in bed and tell my wife ‘‘I will fix this tomorrow, go back to sleep honey.’’ What is not happening: “She is not beliving me:))))”

Any help appretiated.
Thanks.

#2

There are smart apps designed by other to do this.

Canary being one of them. Search smart things form I’m sure you’ll find them.

These might work or at least give you a good starting point.

#3
#4

Getting them back to the state they were before the outage might be tricky. You’d have to store the settings for each bulb as a global variable.

Also, beware of what type of bulb you use for your “canary” bulb. Some bulbs don’t announce their changes to smartthings. For example, I have Cree Connected bulbs. When they change locally (like they do when you power cycle the fixture) that change is never reported back to ST. If you use a bulb like this there is a smartapp called “Pollster” which will allow you to refresh the bulb’s status every so often. It means there will be a delay in acting upon that status but it’s better than nothing. Since I only have two bulbs, mine is only to prevent them from staying on for days when I’m gone for business…not that big a deal.

#5

Thank you Ryan,
I will be testing to see if my bulbs announce their status but meanwhile do you know if Ph Hue (color) bulbs do that?

Thanks for the help
Mahalo.

#6

Thank you for the input TN_Oldman…
I started researching the CANARY thing… I believe this will be the way to go…

#7

I have a pretty decent solution that I use, but it requires a bit of thinking outside the box…

Any bulb that is 100%, webCoRE will turn it off.

It works like a charm, but the only thing is remembering to program OTHER pistons to never go higher that 99%.

I think when I have time to tweak that piston, I will have it also run a second piston that resets all my lights based on time of day, who is home, etc

#8

I think that depends on how you have implemented them, with the bridge or without. But I am not 100% sure.

#9

Ph hue bridge - ST hub…
Yeap it works… kind of,

  • If you turn ON the bulbs via wall switch, bulbs send the signal saying ''hey I am ON" (with 10-15 seconds delay which is no big deal.)
  • If you turn OFF the bulbs, nothing happens, they still look ON (Naturally because no electricity)

I just need to learn how to register each bulbs status maybe every hour (timer will do that) I am just working on learning RECORD DEVICE STATUS.

Do you know any piston that would help me as an example of recording device status?

Thanks a lot.

#10

Why do you need to do that? You’re going to use a bulb that is never programmed to 100% by any of your automations and doesn’t ever get set there manually. That way, you can react to the bulb being on at 100%. No timers, status checks or anything else needed. I use my living room “away” light. That light never goes about 20%. So, if it is ever at 100%, then I know that it’s because the power has gone out.

You don’t want to RECORD DEVICE STATUS. That would be seriously limiting. Webcore subscribes to each of your devices in ST when you set it up to work with that device (by going in to the app on your phone and selecting it under "Available Devices). Then, when something happens, like you turn on a switch, ST will send that event over to any piston that is using that device. It will then run through the piston. Obviously that’s just the 100,000 foot view…there’s a LOT more detail that even I am just scraping the surface on and I’m just over a year in.

#11

That is why I like my simple solution so much:
Any bulb that is 100%, webCoRE will turn it off.

If I need real bright light, I simply use 99%, and my eyes cannot tell the difference. If there is any bulb in my house at 100%, it’s because the power just came on, and my code fixes the bulb within a few seconds after my hub is back online.

On a side note, I helped a friend set up his smart home, and he had a hard time breaking the habit of using the wall switch to turn on or off the light. (obviously, when he turned it off, the smart bulb would stop working) The trick that I did for him was the same as above. If he ever manually turned on the wall switch, webCoRE would turn off the light completely. He quickly learned to never touch the wall switches again, LOL

#12

Here is an example of a basic piston:

temp

The highlights above are all optional, and are not required.

The Set level to 30% line is just me preparing the light for my normal setting… and the double off is simply to make sure that it goes off… but again, those highlighted lines are optional

#13

How can I adjust this type of piston to work with LIFX?

They restore back to previous brightness level and color. So it doesn’t go 100% after brownout/blackout.

#14

It cannot go back to the previous levels unless you capture that state before the power goes out. Otherwise, the expectation is the light will come on at 100%.

… although, if you follow my advice above, you can program the bulb to auto-repair itself to whatever level you want.

#15

But LIFX doesn’t restore to full brightness. They restore to previous brightness. So I’m unable to apply your 100% brightness idea to these bulbs.

It’s beyond me why the restore back to previous level but can’t restore to previous on/off state.

#16

Consider yourself lucky. This option is not available with most bulbs.

You can use a non-LIFX bulb for this purpose. Once that bulbs jumps to 100%, (meaning the power was just restored) then execute a piston (that can do whatever you want to your LIFX bulbs)