I have built a number of light groups to make building automations easy and they do but I have found that some times groups will fail on me, let me explain. I built a simple 2 member group consisting of the lamp on our end tables around our couch. One night those 2 lamps did not fire as part of the automation but everything else did. I tried to manually kick it off but still nothing, I had to re-build the group, delete the original group and all is back. This has happened to me a number of times and NOT to that same group. Any thoughts?
I have done a good amount of testing and for those interested in simple groups (such as light) read on. The bottom line for me anyway is that grouping lights is not reliable. So staying with the example above, I have an automation that, at sunset fires off our couch lamp, that consists of two side table lamps with WIZ bulbs combined into a group. 1 time out of 5 one of those two WIZ bulbs will not fire as part of the automation. Contrary to what I said in the OP, I am able to control that offending light as a single entity but NOT through the group. I have to remove it from the group and then re-add it and we are back. For a further test I re-built the automation using the 2 lamp entities and NOT the group and it never fails on either bulb.
That’s what gets me to say groups are not reliable yet, hope they will be because they are a great feature.
How are you making the group? Are you using the “Group Helper” or are you using the old-style YAML constructor?
Personally, I use light groups for every room in my house, and I find that they are completely reliable. The only time that a group has an issue is when the entity ID of a light changes (and therefore, the group doesn’t know which entity it’s supposed to be controlling). This can happen if an integration is changed, or if something happens with the communication between the device and Home Assistant.
Yes I do use the Group Helper, super simple to create and use. I only have only 4 light groups and all 4 were used in simple sunset / sunrise automations. I have the entities themselves now in the automations and they work as expected but one light (never the same one) will fail now and then if I use the group names in the automations, they don’t fail often but enough to be a pain.