Built In Calendar Skips Events Randomly

Configuration
1

Hi Everyone,

I’ll try to keep this short. I’ve done extensive research on this topic on this forum as well as others and cant seem to find anyone with the same issue as me. I’ll keep it simple, My built-in calendar events simply trigger when they feel like it. I’ll include an example. I have an event that is set to trigger every Sunday at 4pm for the past 6 months, sometimes it triggers sometimes it just doesn’t. I can view this by looking at the logbook. This issue is making me tear my hair out because with an inconsistent calendar, time-based automation is pretty much worthless.

Here is a combined photo since I’m only allowed to post one media item.
The top of the photo is of my Calendar events which I have not touched the config of for over 2 months They’re clearly supposed to trigger every Sunday.
the Bottom is my logbook:
Only triggered twice this month despite there being 3 Sundays this month.
It also triggered like once in April.

Combined
Combined891×1125 118 KB

Anyone else experience this? Any solution i can try?

2

If you’re having an issue with an automation, please post the automation and any debug traces of failed runs. A calendar entity’s state should almost never be used as a trigger. The Logbook will not show a “turn on” event if the calendar state stays “on” due to abutting or overlapping events.

3
  1. Yes I’m aware of the overlapping issue. Just to troubleshoot, i made a calendar with a single event that happens once a week for 1 hour. That’s the example given and as you can see the event doesn’t trigger on the logbook consistently. There currently is no automation attached to this trigger, I simply want to fix my calendar skipping events for some reason.
  2. If i’m not supposed to use Calendar events for automation triggers, then what is the correct way to schedule automations? And why does the Calendar exist? Please help if i’m totally off base here.
4

That’s not what I said. The calendar entity’s state and calendar events are related, but they are not the same thing.

It looks like the calendar turned ‘on’ and ‘off’ as expected on both Sundays… The Logbook is limited to the duration of the Recorder’s purge cycle. The default purge is 10 days. May 5th was more than 10 days prior and May 26th hasn’t happened yet… so the Logbook shown seems to be working normally.

5

I see, i didn’t know the logbook had a 10 day limit on it.

So then how do I use a Calendar Event to trigger an automation without monitoring the Calendar state then checking the message. That’s how all the guides online I saw showed it done.

Is this automation YAML doing it in a bad way?

alias: PD HVAC ON
description: ""
trigger:
  - platform: calendar
    event: start
    offset: "0:0:0"
    entity_id: calendar.hvac_calendar
condition:
  - condition: state
    entity_id: calendar.hvac_calendar
    attribute: message
    state: AC Units On
action:
  - device_id: 8d161f1420478ca8add221d4a9606ead
    domain: climate
    entity_id: climate.t6_pro_z_wave_programmable_thermostat_3
    type: set_hvac_mode
    hvac_mode: cool
mode: single
6

The unreliable method would be to use a State trigger.

What you have shown is the correct way to trigger, since it is using a Calendar Event trigger. Though I would caution against using a State condition as you have. It will work in your example case with a strictly controlled calendar, but it will introduce the same reliability issues if you have overlapping events. The better method is to use template conditions:

alias: PD HVAC ON
description: ""
trigger:
  - platform: calendar
    event: start
    offset: "0:0:0"
    entity_id: calendar.hvac_calendar
condition:
  - condition: template
    value_template: "{{ trigger.calendar_event.summary == 'AC Units On' }}"
action:
  - device_id: 8d161f1420478ca8add221d4a9606ead
    domain: climate
    entity_id: climate.t6_pro_z_wave_programmable_thermostat_3
    type: set_hvac_mode
    hvac_mode: cool
mode: single

You may want to read over the Events and State objects docs if you are not familiar with how HA uses these core objects.

7

Thanks for this, Reading over what you linked and using some of the script you posted has fixed my Calendar Automations.