Automation clock discrepancy

Configuration
1

I am new to HA with a handful of Insteon devices. I installed HASSWP. I am trying to set a simple automation of a light turning on at a certain time. However, the time the light turns on is 5 hours before the time I have set.
The automation trigger is set to 2:57 pm. coding is as follows
id: ‘1650738764220’
alias: turn on column lights
description: ‘’
trigger:

    • platform: time*
  • at: ‘14:57:00’*
    However, the light is turning on at 10:57 am. here is the “Trace timeline”:
    Triggered by the time at April 28, 2022, 10:57:00 AM
    The time zone under “Configuration - General” is set to “America/New_york” which is the time zone I am in.
    Any ideas about what I am doing wrong would be greatly appreciated.
    Thanks in advance.
2

What does that acronym represent?

Whenever there is a discrepancy between the specified time and the time it executes, it is almost always due to a system clock problem. Your timezone is UTC - 4 hours and corresponds to the discrepancy between the scheduled time 14:57 and the time it triggered 10:57 which points to a problem with the system clock’s timezone offset. You said it’s set to America/New_york but the system clock isn’t behaving like it is.

As an experiment, paste this template in the Template Editor and post what it reports.

{{ now() }}
{{ utcnow() }}
4

HassWP is Home Assistant Windows Portable
The “result type” from the template editor is
2022-04-30 15:14:00.000628+00:00
2022-04-30 15:14:00.000628+00:00
does this help?

5

That says that HassWP thinks that tour HA install is using UTC. Try setting the timezone to match your local timezone and then try again.

The first line should be your local clock time, the second line should be different and should match UTC/GMT.

6

Yes. The two times have a timezone offset of zero hours. That’s to be expected for utcnow() but now() should contain your timezone offset (-04:00 for America/New_york) but it doesn’t. Follow Tinkerer’s instructions.

BTW, at least we know the problem you’re experiencing is the usual one I described previously (system clock’s timezone is incorrect).

7

Tinkerer/Taras
thank you for your assistance. I have no programming experience and I cannot figure out where/how to change the time zone. I’ve looked at my configuration.yaml file in notepad (see below) but it doesn’t have this information. it looks very generic. Am I looking in the wrong place? Is there a reference to this issue that has more detailed instructions?
Thanks again

default_config:
group: !include groups.yaml
automation: !include automations.yaml
script: !include scripts.yaml
scene: !include scenes.yaml
start_time:
#demo:
#sonoff:

username: [email protected]

password: mypassword

8

It’s handled in the general settings section of the UI.

9

You can adjust the time settings as Tinkerer has told you or add the missing information by hand in your configuration.yaml:


homeassistant:
  name: !secret home_location
  latitude: !secret home_lat
  longitude: !secret home_lon
  elevation: !secret home_elevation
  unit_system: metric
  time_zone: Europe/Berlin
  …
  …
  …and so on
10

Hi Everyone
I really appreciate the assistance I am getting with this. My “time Zone” in the General Settings is correctly set for “America/New_York”. I have tried to include a screenshot. Any other suggestions?
thanks again for helping out.

image

11

It’s highly likely your problem is because you’re using HassWP, switching to a supported (and supportable) install method should solve that.