Using the Schedule Helper in an Automation you can check the trigger From Off to ON and On to Off. There are some other statuses too, Unavailable and Unknown.
What is the status when HA is rebooted or stopped for several minutes and then started?
What happens if the status would have changed during the HA down time?
Example: The Automation is configured to turn on a light at 19:00 so the trigger is From Off, To On. HA is shutdown at 18:55 and started up at 19:05.
Is the From Unavailable or Unknown and the To is On?
Or is the From and To both On and therefore the Automation will not trigger?
What I have seen is that it works when entering/leaving the scheduled slot… I never tested it when HA starts within the slot. It may be a gap but I actually like this, use case: I trigger an warning/action based on a slot (eg. water plants)…if within the slot I act on the action then I want to turn the warning off…even though it is still within the slot
I installed another instance of HA on a VM on my Proxmox Server and did the following.
Created as Schedule Helper and select ON at 11:00 to 11:30 today.
Created an Automation with the following triggers.
From Off to On, Trigger ID OFF-ON
From Unavailable to On, Trigger ID UNAVAILABLE-ON
From Unknown to On, Trigger ID UNKNOWN-ON
Action: Log a persistent Notification showing the triggers.id
Shutdown the HA VM at 10:55.
Started the HA VM at 11:05.
When HA started there was no Persistent Message and nothing in the LogBook.
History does show the Schedule Helper On at 11:00.
This would indicate to me that there is no transition for the Schedule Helper when HA is started and the state should change.
So this means if you use Schedule Helper to turn on or off light or what every at specific times and HA is down during that time then when HA is started it will not trigger automations to do things for the now current state. This is a shame. This is no different as far as I know than having a specific time as a trigger and HA was down during that time.
I think the Schedule should transition from Unknown to On in my example above. So you would have to have 2 triggers, From Unknown to On and Off to On,
If this would be a feature then it would / should (me-thinking) appl only on restart but I am not even sure if automations apply then. Example: I yesterday rebooted right at dusk and none of my light-automations worked due to that. And if there is a large schedule slot of many hours and one reboots in the middle, if that fires off anything else, I also may not want that as it already fired off at the start.
I myself would not want the schedule to be checked all the time as this blocks me from turning it off manually. On the other hand, maybe it should have an overarching option to reset-to-last state ?
Pro’s and con’s