Relative newbie here, but have gone all in with HA and loving what I’ve learned so far.
I’m wondering how I can have one automation be aware of another and take appropriate action? For example, I have some smart relays which control the underfloor heating manifold.
They are governed by an automation which listens to my heat pump, and if it has decided the house needs heat, the automation runs some additional logic and will enable the underfloor heating until the ash is no longer heating.
Now I always want my underfloor heating to be active between 0030 - 0430hours, which is our electricity suppliers off-peak rate.
The issue I had last night was that the heating came on from about 2300 - 0100, and so when the off peak automation ran, the UFH was already on, and the heat pump automation turned it off when it finished…
The way I handle things like this is to disable other automations if this one is active using the Turn Off Automation service. I have quite a few automations that get dynamically toggled like this. For instance I have all my motion sensors set to turn lights on and off as needed, but sometimes I need those lights to stay on so I have a button (actually voice command, but same basic idea) that disables the motion sensors for 1 hour by turning off those motion sensor automations.
You can try to say “don’t do this between these hours” but then if you change the hours on one automaton then you have to remember to do the other as well, this way there is no dependency, the active automation just simply disables the other automation.