One-shot triggers vs triggers that re-triggers themself

Configuration
1

Say we have this automation:

    automation:
      alias: Turn on light when sun sets
      trigger:
        - platform: sun
          event: sunset
      action:
        service: light.turn_on

Sun goes down and lights come on. All is well.

Then I go to frontend and manually turn the lights off. And they stays off to the next sunset. Makes perfect sense.

Now take this seemingly equivalent example:

automation:
  alias: Turn on light when sun sets
  trigger:
    - platform: state
      entity_id: sun.sun
      state: below_horizon
  action:
    service: light.turn_on

And again, after triggering, I go to the frontend and turn lights off. But this time, after about 20-30 seconds, light turns on! Obviously, sun’s state trigger re-triggered itself.
I wonder if there are other triggers that show same behavior (retriggering)? Is it something that described somewhere?

2

To understand that behavior you need to understand a little bit about how the “sun” component works in HA.

It actually updates periodically (every minute or so?) And sunset is a single discrete event that is fired only once on the first sun update after sunset.

By contrast, below_horizon is true while the sun is below the horizon, and if used as an event is fired every time sun updates.

Other components don;t really do this on the whole. A light on event fires only when the actual state changes for instance.

The difference here is that a number of the sun based state variables change consistently throughout the day, e.g. elevation, so it updates regularly for those state changes.

3

Oh, thank you very much! Now it makes much more sense!

4

You can use a ‘from’ limiter though to make the retrigger onlybhappen once. See below.

https://github.com/CCOSTAN/Home-AssistantConfig/blob/master/automation/sunrise_turnon_and_off.yaml

1 Like
5

Thanks for pointing out from. I tried using to instead of state but still got lots of re-triggers.
I thought maybe to: on would be saying, “trigger if the state has changed to on”, so it would not re-trigger if it was still on (not changed to something new), but that doesn’t seem to be the case (and docs say to is an alias for state: https://home-assistant.io/docs/automation/trigger/).

How would I get an automation to not trigger when it was triggered recently? (simply!)
E.g. motion sensor that reports immediately when it sees motion, but not again for 3 minutes.
I can’t use the for because it won’t be ‘on’ for long. I’d rather not have to set up two more automations/scripts/input_booleans to achieve this.
Is there a simple way to ‘debounce’ automation triggers to avoid frequent repeats?
Thanks :slight_smile:

6

I think you might be able to just write the automation using the From and the on. And then at the END of the automation put in a 3 minute delay. So the script will keep ‘running’ for 3 minutes or however long. At that point, it will be ‘reset’ to run again.