The automation shown in the attached image is supposed to turn on two different outdoor lights when it is nighttime and motion is sensed in the driveway. Recently I noticed only one light was turning on, and I discovered later that the other light did eventually turn on after about 3 minutes. Upon reviewing the traces it even shows the 3 minute delay (see second image). Can anyone help explain this behavior? Is there a setting that dictates some sort of a delay between actions? The goal is to have them both turn on at roughly the same time. Thanks!
If the lights are something like WIFI and possibly Tuya, the request has to be filtered thru China first.
Or if they are zigbee lights you could have interference or a flooded network.
Yeah, they’re WiFi - TPLink. But I can turn them on manually (within HA) and they respond instantly. So why would there be a difference between activating them manually vs. though an automation?
Is your automation being triggered sequentially, or concurrently?
If you look at the screenshot of the automation I assume it’s sequential. I used the automation builder and didn’t code the yaml manually, so I didn’t know if there was a way to execute truly concurrent actions.
Also as I mentioned this automation used to work fine. Something must have changed with the last month or so. I may end up having to go through the change logs to see if anything might be affecting this situation.
Most likely explanation is RF interference. It’s less likely with WiFi lights than Zigbee, but it depends on the network. Changing RF background conditions can be hard to detect since humans don’t see RF waves.
Unless you might want to immediately manually turn the lights off within seconds of them going on, you could try to wrap the turn on calls in a loop that runs 3 times or something like that, with 2-second delays after each attempt. That way you force some redundancy.
I don’t have a ton of experience yet, but maybe you can try parallel branches where one light is turned on in each branch.
So for kicks I switched the order of turning on the lights, and now they operate essentially simultaneously. I may experiment further but for now it works so I’m inclined to leave it be. Still would be nice to know the root cause.