Check if Scene Exists in Automation

Configuration
1

Hello.
I have created an automation for some lights which brightens them when motion is detected and after a few minutes restores their previous state.

I’ve noticed that sometimes the lights do not return to their original dim state.
I believe what may be happening is that the automation is triggering again while the lights are already in a bright state and the temporary state is being over written with these values.

I wanted to try and add an if statement before creating the temporary state file but I cannot find the correct syntax for it. The examples I’ve found don’t seem to apply to what I am doing.

Hopefully I’m explaining this clearly enough.
Any suggestions to get this to work properly are appreciated.
Thanks

2

I’m not sure that the saved scene always disappears immediately after it is used. If does with a reboot, but other than that… So I’d probably use some other entity to remember if I created the scene and changed the lights. An input helper could work, or if you are using a timer then you could check for the timer to see if it is running.

You could also check for the brightness using a numeric state condition on the brightness attribute (it goes from 0 to 255, this one is not a percentage!), if you know what brightness you are looking for.

3

Thanks for the suggestions.
At the end of my automation I have a Scene Delete action that is supposed to remove the temporary scene.

It does mostly work but occasionally I have to manually reset the lights to their previous state and run that scene delete command to get it back to normal.
I haven’t been able to track down where it is going wrong yet.

For reference here is my automation YAML taken from the editor:

alias: Porch Motion Activated Lights
description: ""
triggers:
  - entity_id: binary_sensor.motion_sensor_motion
    from: "off"
    to: "on"
    trigger: state
conditions:
  - condition: sun
    before: sunrise
    after: sunset
  - condition: or
    conditions:
      - condition: time
        after: "00:00:00"
        before: "01:00:00"
      - condition: time
        before: "23:59:00"
    enabled: false
actions:
  - action: scene.create
    metadata: {}
    data:
      scene_id: motion_porch_state
      snapshot_entities:
        - light.porch_lamp_left_light
        - light.porch_lamp_right_light
  - alias: Turn on the light
    action: light.turn_on
    data:
      transition: 3
      brightness_pct: 100
      kelvin: 6500
    target:
      device_id:
        - 79598c93465930b79133e76cb77e142d
        - db9eee64bbd9a248e2a3ed0c051877bb
  - alias: Wait until there is no motion from device
    wait_for_trigger:
      entity_id: binary_sensor.motion_sensor_motion
      from: "on"
      to: "off"
      trigger: state
    timeout:
      hours: 0
      minutes: 2
      seconds: 0
      milliseconds: 0
  - alias: Wait the number of seconds that has been set
    delay:
      hours: 0
      minutes: 5
      seconds: 0
      milliseconds: 0
  - action: scene.turn_on
    metadata: {}
    target:
      entity_id: scene.motion_porch_state
  - action: scene.delete
    metadata: {}
    data: {}
    target:
      entity_id: scene.motion_porch_state
mode: restart
max_exceeded: silent
4

Well, the scene create, paired with restart mode in the automation will definitely ruin the scene. But I doubt you can test the state of a non existing scene. If so the state would probably be unknown.

5

Thank you. I’m not sure how or why I had changed the mode. I’ve set it back to single now.

Also, I found a post which seems to have helped.

I believe I have this working correctly now:

if:
  - condition: not
    conditions:
      - condition: template
        value_template: "{{ states.scene.motion_porch_state != None }}"
then:
  - action: scene.create
    metadata: {}
    data:
      scene_id: motion_porch_state
      snapshot_entities:
        - light.porch_lamp_left_light
        - light.porch_lamp_right_light

Thanks again for your input.

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