Around the time I set up Hue bulbs for the sunrise simulation I began to have a very odd problem with a couple Home Assistant controlled lights. Turns out that problem was caused by turning them off with transition: 0.
In our HA instance I have two helpers, each called Interior Lights, with one being a group of switches and the other a group of lights; both containing only things we’d consider interior lights. I then have an automation that turns both groups off, and trigger it from something like All Interior Lights Off which I’ll commonly trigger before going to bed, when leaving the house, etc.
Because a group entity can only hold the same type of entity, and we have lights that are both lights entities (i.e. bulbs) and switches entities (i.e. smart switches controlling dumb bulbs) we need one group for each type.
The specific problem was that two lights in the group group — one being an IKEA TRADFRI 800 lumen bulb and the other BTF-LIGHTING Zigbee single-color LED controller — started acting oddly. At first it was hard to tell what was going on, the IKEA bulb would seem to be on when not expected and the LED strip would be off when it should be on, but eventually I found repeatable cases:
- When triggering All Interior Lights Off automation, if the IKEA bulb was already off, it’d turn on at minimum brightness.
- After using All Interior Lights Off, the BTF-LIGHTING LEDs, on next on command, would flicker on and then almost immediately turn off.
It turns out the problem was having transition: 0 on the light group’s off automation. Back when doing tweaking for the Hue bulbs I changed this because otherwise these bulbs would dim out over 1-2 seconds instead of just turning off, and I didn’t like this. Unfortunately, this change exposed some bugs.
So I removed the transition from the automation and poof; no more weird problems.
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