Right now, it takes two steps to “reuse” a condition for many purposes: an input_boolean and a kludgy automation that uses triggers and conditions to change the input_boolean. Perhaps a blueprint might help but that’s still not all that clean when conceptually it’s the potentially complex condition that isn’t being represented very well.
The use cases are manyfold:
- Various conditional reasons to not dim (nor continue to dim) the lights in an area automatically, such as “party night”, excessive motion in the area, someone’s not home yet or an overriding choice of a scene in the area. (This covers lots of different case scenarios.)
- Similarly, actions to start various scenes often depend on similar complex conditionals.
- Refrain from running a variety of automations if there’s a guest staying in the guestroom (and again for others in other guestrooms!). Each of these rooms would already have an input_boolean but it would take other helper/automation combos to deal with common hallways and bathrooms, etc.
Given the esoteric nature of some of the new helpers, it seems like another great addition would be a Condition Helper. This seems like a simple way to clean up a lot of workarounds that require a combination of some other helper and related separate automations. I get everything can be done without this enhancement but it would make life a lot easier in anything but the simplest configurations.
Cheers,
Ron