Need help with triggering an automation when a timestamp is X days old

Configuration
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1

Hello all,

I am trying to get a low-battery warning for my various Insteon Leak sensors, which talk to HA through MQTT. In addition to wet/dry, they each connect daily for a ‘heartbeat’. This shows up in HA as a timestamp entity. I pulled one battery out and sure enough, the timestamp of that sensor’s heartbeat still shows the last day it was successful. So, I need an automation that notifies me when any of those heartbeat sensors’ entities states gets to be more than 2 days ago. But it’s not formatted nicely, so I am stuck.

Right now, the State of the Entity i’m playing with says this “2022-04-22T22:48:32+00:00”.

Can anyone help me make an automation that constantly monitors those entities and fires whenever that timestamp strays further than 2 days from current time?

2

You can use a template.

trigger:
  platform: template
  value_template: >-
    "{{ (utcnow() | as_timestamp - states.light.living_room.last_updated | as_timestamp) | int(0) 
       > 172800  }}"

This takes the current UTC time converts it to unix time subtracts the last updated time of the entity converted to unix time, makes it a integer and checks if it is past two days. It true it will trigger the automation.

3

Thank you for the response. I have a couple of questions:

  1. My actual heartbeat entity is sensor.ls_attic_ac_pan_heartbeat. Should I just swap that into the template so it reads “states.sensor.ls_attic_ac_pan_heartbeat.last_upated” (instead of light.living_room)?

  2. You use the “last_updated” but I am not sure that’s right because my heartbeat entity says it was last updated 3 hours ago, but the entity itself gives me the last successful heartbeat from April 22. Are you sure this solution would need to reference “last_updated”?

4

You should use your heartbeat. states('sensor.ls_attic_ac_pan_heartbeat') if that is the date and time that shows last communication.