I randomly got an error upon trying to increase color temperature for my lights

Configuration
1

I have a script in HA:

service: light.turn_on
target:
  entity_id: light.alle_lichter
data:
  kelvin: "{{states.light.alle_lichter.attributes.color_temp_kelvin - 500}}"

it’s supposed to make all my lights’ color temperature warmer, but it just stopped working randomly. I didn’t install an update or changed hardware.

Upon running the action in the script I get the following error:
Error running action
Error rendering data template: TypeError: unsupported operand type(s) for -: ‘NoneType’ and ‘int’

how do I fix that?

By the way, it started working again after I changed the color temp of one of my lights that had a numeric value instead of “null” as their attribute for color_temp_kelvin. This cause the attribute for my all-lights-entity to become a numeric value instead of “null”.
I still need a proper fix for when it reoccurs though.

2

Hello Arsalan,

So you are subtracting 500 from some attribute number to set the kelvin?

I might expect that to get out of range possibly and error, causing a problem. You think that is possible?

3

So what I’d need to do to test your theory is to crank the color temperature up all the way and go beyond the max value with my script, right?
I tried that and didn’t get the error from that.

Another thought I had was that maybe since my “all-lights-entity” contains some lights that simply don’t have a color temperature, it might cause this bug. I have no idea though.

Anyway, I can’t replicate the issue right now.
In order to do that, I tried using my script after restarting HA and then again after manually changing the brightness of a light that doesn’t have a color temperature but that didn’t do the trick.

4

No, I’m thinking if that number is lower than 500, the result will be a negative number when you subtract 500 from it.

5

What are you referring to with your “no”? Perhaps I misphrased this: When I said “crank the color temperature up all the way and go beyond the max value” I meant lowering as much as possible. I was saying the opposite because the Lovelace slider for color temperature is actually turned upwards to lower the color temperature so I was mixing that up.

Secondly, the lowest possible color_temp_kelvin value for all of my lights that have that value is 2702, so I wonder if it’s even possible to cause the value to go below 0.

I tried that out by just subtracting 500 with my script so many times that it would reach 0 if it wouldn’t stop at the 2702 limit but that didn’t cause any errors.

I actually noticed that most of my lights go significantly warmer than 2702 kelvin but that they wouldn’t do that when using the script, since it uses a group entity that only respects the highest min_color_temp_kelvin of all the lights that are in that group. Not sure how this is related to the error. Anyway, to fix that, I split the lights into several groups. Although I find that bit impractical, considering I now also have to split lovelace sliders.

After splitting the lights up and playing around with them for a bit, I randomly started getting the issue + error just on my hallway lights, even though they were at a very high colortemp.

After turning my lights off and on again, the issue disappeared and didn’t reoccur even when I subtracted 500 kelvin from my hallway lights via my script so often that it should go below 0 if there was no limit.

So, I don’t think a negative number is the issue here.

6

Obviously, color_temp_kelvin becomes null for your group in some circumstances.
Difficult to give you a general response, it can depends on the type of lights in the group. It seems to be mostly null for me.

2 Likes
7

So this?

kelvin: "{{(states.light.alle_lichter.attributes.color_temp_kelvin | default(2700)) - 500}}"

or pick another number for the 2700…

2 Likes
8

erm tf does this do?

9

It makes sure that is a number, and not null so it works in the math statement. If it’s null or something else that is not a number, it plugs in the number 2700.

As long as you set the 2700 to a number >= to what you are from it subtracting, the statement should not error.