One-off Events

I’ve been plugging away and doing better and better automation for my house. Everything is working great so far!

My girlfriend asked about a specific automation she needs, one-time events. Two examples:

  • One-time Heating. We have guests coming over today at 5:00pm. We keep our house at 63 degrees normally (heating is expensive), but would like to up it to 70 before the guests arrive (so they don’t realize we are total cheapskates). So a schedule of Honeywell to 70 @ 4:45pm should fix that, but we don’t want it to fire every day.

  • Variable Alarmclock. We have grown used to using our hue lights to wake us up using lighting rather than jarring noise. Girlfriend wants to wake up at 6:30am on a specific saturday to go meet her friends, but normally would rather sleep in until 9 (you’ve probably guessed we don’t have kids). The one-off event should fire a gradual light increase at 6:00 - 6:30, but only on that one day (not every day, or even every saturday).

Is there an easy way to accomplish this? I did some searching, but I don’t know if I know the lingo well enough to articulate it to google. Any help is appreciated, even if its just a simple hyperlink.

Your best bet would be to use use one of the calendar components (this obviously assumes that you have marked when your guests are coming over and when your girlfriend has to meet her friends on your calendar) and use it in your automation as a condition.

If that is not possible, you could create two separate input_boolean and use them as conditions in your automations. So, for example, you can create an automation to heat to 70 when input_boolean.guests is on otherwise heat it to 63. You can use the similar logic for the alarm clock automation.

Holy crud, the calendar components look like they may do the trick. Thank you for pointing me in that direction!