Assistance with state change in automation

[WallyR (Wally)]

First a little warning about using device ids instead of entity ids.

Why and how to avoid device_ids in automations and scripts

Background When you start writing automations, a device trigger seems the obvious choice. Everybody knows what a device is and it comes at the top of the UI dropdown list. [image] It works… but it is certainly not a “great way to start” because it is storing up problems for the future. Far better to use an entity, with state or numeric_state. Device_id problems The yaml will be longer and harder to follow, which may make maintenance difficult, especially a few months down the line when y…

Next you can see in the trigger section that you have from and to keys.
If you look at the state trigger in the automation trigger documentation for HA you will see that there is an option to use not_from and not_to also. There is also an example of using it with the unknown/unavailable states.