Cancelling an automation in WAIT block

[rogue2019]

I recently created a webhook to enable a POST trigger a heating source. The idea is a button is pressed on the wallpanel and the automation switches on the heating for 60 minutes (a boost, if you will) and then switches off. However, if the automation is triggered and sits in the WAIT block, I can’t see a way to cancel it (say for example the button was pressed by mistake etc).

The means that I need to wait for the 60 minutes before I can use this again. ( I manually switch on the source but trigger fills the log with “Webhook already running”

Any ideas? Still relatively new with HA so perhaps I have the workflow all wrong.
thanks

[koying (Chris B)]

Try using a Timer rather than doing wait in the automation.
HA is event-based, so, generally speaking, loops or waits in automation should be avoided (imo).

Timer

[tom_l]

Another option is to turn the heater on with the automation, as you have it now but do not wait for 60 minutes.

Instead, write another automation that is triggered if the heater has been on for 60 minutes that turns the heater off

This has the advantage of not needing to restore the timer after a Home Assistant restart. Though the 60 minutes will begin counting again after the restart.

If you do go with the timer, here is a great post on how to restore them:

Restore active/paused timers after a restart

Notice of Deprecation Thanks to the contribution of raman325, starting from Home Assistant version 2022.4, an active or paused timer entity can be restored after a restart. Therefore the restoration technique described in this topic is no longer needed. This topic remains for historical purposes, in case someone is curious to learn more about the scripting techniques it used to restore active/paused timers. However no further support for it will be provided now that timer restoration is a nat…

[anon63427907]

i would use an input boolean helper, if button is pressed, turn on boolean, set heater on.

if button is on for 60 minutes, turn the heater off and turn off boolean.

i would not rely on if heater is on for 60 minutes trigger, as you can turn on manually without using booster functionality.

Lastly, if heater is somehow updated manually, turn off input boolean so heater can keep its manually assigned state

[diamonddrake]

I realize this is an old post, but incase anyone ends up here a solution for “I want something to work for x time after I do y, and restart the x time every time I do y, even if its already running” is to change the trigger mode to restart. That’s exactly what it’s for.

[sndrod (Dan)]

Thank you Mr Drake! 3 years on from the previous post, this was very helpful. Would have saved me an hour in doing any of the above! This community is awesome.