Everyday, I set all associating lights back to their “brightness level”.
E.g.
We turn on Living Room in the evening without a specific level (i.e.“default” 90%)
In a few hours we decide to lower to 30%
Go to bed
To prevent the next evening from being at 30% I have an automation that sets the light at 8 a.m. to 90% but have to turn it on then off quickly
Is there anyway to “reset” the light to a brightness without needing to turn it on? I don’t want to set all my automations to a brightness, because of an issue with motion detection. I go to turn down the brightness as the night goes on and I don’t want to reset always back to 90%.
I noticed a feature request for something like this but not sure if there has been anything added that anyone is aware of since then. The only alternative I can think of is using scenes instead, but I don’t want to rethink the entirety of our workflow for using our lights
It is rather annoying not being able to set brightness/color without actually turning on a light.
I typically use a fade on/off option when doing light automation.
You can also use ‘choose’ action to set the lights at different color/level depending on other criteria (time/date/existing light level/etc), it can get complicated quickly, but better to keep as simple as possible.
That is correct. Home assistant can do it if the light itself has the ability to set it without turning it on. Most APIs do not offer this functionality.
Custom ESP or Tasmota devices are the only ones off the top of my head that support it.
I have to test this out, but I had a thought of: what if I set the transition to be like 30 seconds or a minute but then go right to turn the light off. I wonder if this would avoid the flashing on.
FWIW, most of my bulbs and lights are either Philips Hue Zigbee, or Z-Wave Dimmers.
Alternatively, I ended up seeing some people set up some sort of variable to keep track of but that just seems annoying to pursue on top of everything else I got going on in my yaml files.
It did not unfortunately, the transition didn’t really start at 0 for long enough before turning off. Didn’t make much of a difference.
For now, I’m testing out a motion automation where the “first instance call” of that automation uses a specific light brightness and every thereafter for that day just uses the default.
At time I was examining HA for this abilities (granted, it was 5years ago) HA was unable to control light attributes other way than via turn_on action.
This is why I achieve that through mqtt, dodging light integration.
Can you point me to the documentation that mentions this ability of core HA?
Ahh, so it’s only a matter of a particular integration, and HA internally makes no use of it? For example, touching colors on the light card turns the light on, right?
If the above is true, then saying that “HA can do it” is a long stretch, isn’t it?
BTW Core Shelly integration doesn’t expose the action to change the light attributes alone. Even though Shelly devices can do that.
Why do you always try to debate things? If any bit of home assistant can do a function, that means the software can do the function. There’s no grey line, it’s possible.
Because I read your responses as a regular user, and I can see that they might be confusing for users that don’t know details. HA doesn’t implement these features into light domain. SO you cannot control it via unified light properties, nor unified actions. Every time i requires a custom approach. So, for me, it does not support that.
Can it be worked around with HA? Sure. The same way you can do it with NR, bash, MQTT etc, calling some custom endpoints. It realy doesn’t matter these are proxied by HA actions or are device endpoints since they are not unified anyway.
The result is not reflected in the light entities represented by HA (internally and in GUI). This is the missing piece of the information.
BTW years ago your answer on the same question was: HA does not support it. Now you insist the opposite, even though no implementation changed (?)
Because those options didn’t exist years ago. Now they exist as normal service calls / actions you can do through the UI. So they are not a work-around. Hence, it can be done. Can it be done on the light? No. That doesn’t mean it can’t be done. Now move along, I don’t really care about any “technicalities” you’re trying to bring up.
@kentoe I had a similar problem to you, so I created a HACS custom component action this morning that lets you set the brightness of Hue lights while they’re switched off.
If your Hue lights use the Hue bridge and core Hue integration, then feel free to try this out and LMK how you get on.
Thanks for the suggestion, I am using the hue bulbs via zigbee directly unfortunately so this wouldn’t help my specific usecase.
I ended up implementing a more complicated automation as follows that helps “start the day” at a certain brightness:
Here’s a snippet:
- conditions:
- condition: time
after: "11:00:00"
before: "23:00:00"
sequence:
- choose:
# FIRST trigger after 11:00am -> force default brightness
- conditions:
- condition: template
value_template: >
{{ is_state('light.nursery_lights', 'off')
and as_local(states.light.nursery_lights.last_changed) < today_at('11:00') }}
sequence:
- action: light.turn_on
target:
entity_id: light.nursery_lights
data:
brightness_pct: 80 # <-- "start of daytime" brightness
default:
# Subsequent triggers (same day after 11am) -> restore last settings
# (No brightness_pct provided)
- action: light.turn_on
target:
entity_id: light.nursery_lights
Still wouldn’t resolve it for the other lights that I do not use automations or motion sensors though I haven’t looked into the adaptive HACS plugin for this again.
