Advice for disabling/overriding automation flows

Hi There.

tl;dr : I need suggestions for disabling / overriding automation flows “manually”.

I am a new member of the HA community, but I have been using HA for about 2 months now.
I have integrated my HA installation with Node-Red and am using it as my primary automation flow creator.

I’ve searched through the forums and reddit, but didn’t find anything to answer my question.

I need some advice on how to disable automation flows. For example.
I have a room that has an electric fireplace and some lights. My automation flow works perfectly and I’m very happy with it, but I do want the option to disable that flow, or override it manually.

For example, I want my fireplace and lights in the room to turn off and stay off when I go to bed if I toggle the light switch or tell alexa to turn off the lights, regardless of any other automation rules passing.

I’ve thought about creating virtual switches and toggling their values and then adding those to the decision tree of my automations, but I was hoping you would have some better suggestions.

Is there a way to determine whether a switch was triggered manually ( like through Alexa or by hitting the physical toggle on the wall ) or whether it was triggered by an automation calling the service.xxxx service in HA?

Thanks in advance for all your suggestions!

check out this thread. There is a new feature in node red web socket thingy, you can expose some nodes back to home assistant and you can enable / disable them.

I have a few input booleans that I use within my flows.

I have one for guest mode… when that is enabled, a lot of my flows are bypassed. Works great when in-laws are over; or a babysitter etc.

I also have one for quiet hours that is tied to an automation. This restricts any announcements via Alexa at night or early AM.

Lastly one for vacation mode…

Great, thanks!
Those are already some great suggestions!

I appreciate it!

Input booleans! I’m just getting started, and I didn’t even know input booleans existed. This is exactly what I was looking for and it took my automations to the next level.

Thanks for your random comment from 2 years ago.

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