Restart-robust Temporary Automation Pause

I have a few automations that I temporarily want to turn off sometimes, like motion lights, or devices that will automatically turn off during certain times of the day that I want to “override” and temporarily turn on for a few minutes. Some of these have long pauses (e.g. 300 minutes) so I want the delay to be robust enough to handle restarts.

The automation uses a time pattern to check its state over and over again until the re-enablement time has been reached. This isn’t perfectly robust to long periods of downtime (could use a target time instead) but for me that doesn’t matter too much.

I picked this idea up from somewhere on this forum a year or two ago, and finally found a second use case, so figured it was worth sharing back my version.

Install

Open your Home Assistant instance and show the blueprint import dialog with a specific blueprint pre-filled.
Source Code - PRs or issues welcome!

Setup

You need three things that the automation setup describes:

  • An input button to trigger the pause
  • An input switch to track the state of the pause
  • A counter to track how many minutes are left until the automation is re-enabled

Your counter config controls how long the automation is paused for. You can run the time pattern check at any interval you want, but the step size of the counter needs to match the pattern.

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