Smart plug, switch off when power consumption is less than.. switches off straight away each time!

Configuration
1

Hi all,

New to this so may be being very silly… would appreciate your thoughts on what may be wrong. I have a smart plug attached to a vacuum cleaner. To try out automation, I am wanting to write a script that turns off the smart plug when it goes below a certain power threshold (basically protect the batteries from going above 80% charge). In my case thats 15 watts. So I have two entities;

  1. The switch itself, “switch.X”
  2. The power reported by the switch “sensor.Y”

I wrote the following, however whilst the charger is well above 15 watts, when I click to run the automation it switches the power off straight away every time… so does not appear to be monitoring the request to switch off only after 1 minute of below 15w

alias: Vacuum charger manager
description: ""
trigger:
  - platform: numeric_state
    entity_id: sensor.Y
    below: 15
    for:
      hours: 0
      minutes: 1
      seconds: 0
condition: []
action:
  - type: turn_off
    device_id: 799e39eaf00b4afaeb55f93307c61999
    entity_id: switch.X
    domain: switch
mode: single
2

The trigger will only fire when the state crosses the threshold. Meaning, it will need to go from 16+ to less than 15, then if it stays below 15 for 1 minute, you’ll get the trigger.

It will not trigger if the threshold is not crossed. I.e. if your state is 14 and it changes to 13, it will not trigger.

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image857×485 48.6 KB

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3

Running an automation from the UI only tests the action part, not the trigger. To test that you could change the value of sensor.Y in Developer Tools.

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4

Thanks, noted. Its kind of weird in that it was at 15.4w when I press ‘Run’ on the rule and it immediately turned off… (obviously I am expecting to observe it turn off after falling below 15). But, now I have left it alone (ie the rule is still ‘ON’, I did not press ‘Run’ again)… I turned on the switch and it left it alone and it worked!

5

When you press run you skip the triggers as stiltjack pointed out. So it doesn’t matter what the value is, it’s just going to run when you press run.

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6

Sorry I am with you both now. For a novice, it does seem a little confusing that clicking run on a automation would skip part of the rules you have written.

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