I am attempting to change a switch state to on at a certain time.
automation:
- alias: "Lights On"
trigger:
- platform: time
at: '16:15:00'
action:
- service: switch.turn_on
data:
entity_id:
- switch.wphome17l
state: 'on'
Doesn’t seem to do anything at all. Is there anything that I’m not getting right here? I feel like it’s something to do with the service it’s calling but I’ve not found anything to say otherwise
I had this simple automation:
- alias: Pond pumps on
trigger:
- platform: time
at: '11:00:00'
action:
service: switch.turn_on
entity_id: switch.pond_pumps
But it did not start. It started to work when I added the following sensor and restarted:
- platform: time_date
display_options:
- time
- date
I would have thought this dependency would be automatically resolved but it is working now anyway
I think your issue is the switch.turn_on service does not accept a state variable. You should write your automation this way:
automation:
- alias: "Lights On"
trigger:
- platform: time
at: '16:15:00'
action:
- service: switch.turn_on
entity_id: switch.wphome17l
Thanks! I have changed the schedule for 10 minutes time so I will let you know what it does!
The Homekit device discovery does seem to be a bit iffy after a restart of HA though and I find I am having to restart the service multiple times to get the switch to appear again
Honestly, I don’t see how enabling the date & time sensors has anything to do with this.
If an automation is not triggering when a time trigger using at: specifies, then it’s more likely you have a timezone issue. You should make sure that both HA and the underlying OS are set to the same, correct timezone. If they differ, that can cause time-based triggers to not work correctly. Setting both timezones correctly is a documented requirement.
Also, make sure your automation is ‘on’. I don’t know what your HA experience is, but I know some new users have gotten confused about what turning an automation on and off does.
I am an extremely new user to HA. Only started looking at it this week.
The timezone set within HA;
time_zone: Europe/London
OS time;
root@V-Ubnt006:~# date
Thu Sep 13 17:04:58 BST 2018
I guess it’s possible there is a conflict if Europe/London is infact UTC and not BST. I am also not able to see whether it’s possible to set a +1 in HA. To test, I’ve set the time to be 18:30 BST, so if it is an hour out, by setting the time in the configuration to be 17:30, it will trigger.
Edit: it’s just gone 17:30 BST, so nothing yet so I will wait till 18:30BST and see if it works
Regarding setting the automation to on. How can I double check this? I can see the trigger within the main web UI and I can also trigger it using the automation.trigger in the Services page.
Light just came on. Thanks for your help guys! Just need to get it to send a push notification now 
Displaying and setting the timezone in Linux can get a bit complicated. But you should be able to check your OS’s timezone setting by doing this:
cat /etc/timezone
In your case, it should say Europe/London (if it agrees with the setting in HA.) Or you can use:
timedatectl
Which will show more info. E.g., for me it prints:
pi@raspberrypi:/home/homeassistant/.homeassistant $ timedatectl
Local time: Thu 2018-09-13 12:47:56 CDT
Universal time: Thu 2018-09-13 17:47:56 UTC
RTC time: n/a
Time zone: America/Chicago (CDT, -0500)
Network time on: yes
NTP synchronized: yes
RTC in local TZ: no
And you can change it by doing:
sudo dpkg-reconfigure tzdata
See https://help.ubuntu.com/community/UbuntuTime for more details.
Thanks for that. I am a Linux sysadmin so that stuff is okay, it’s more the HA stuff that is new to me 
Okey dokey. Always hard to tell/guess at what ones background might be on this forum. 
And it usually doesn’t hurt to spell things out anyway for others that might come along and find this discussion later who might not be as familiar with the details.