Home Assistant - Reliable Restart Proof ✨🕒Timers🕒✨

[@schogaia]

It can be improved further by adding the trigger "home assistant startet" and turning off the sprinkler in case it's on while the timer is idle after a start. That would also cover the case that the timer has expired while home assistant was unavailable.

[@smart_home_australia]

Interesting, I didn't think of that one. I'll add that into my prod environment and come back if I have issues.

[@drumslapper]

Good one, will be implemented in my watering plan 👍

[@smart_home_australia]

Happy to help with your watering plans! Next you'll need an Aspire R4 to mower your lush lawn (kzbin.info/www/bejne/a4e1h2B7hruMm5Y) :)

[@Mad-Jam]

One thing i use in critical cases is an extra "trigger: homeassistant event: start" complated with triggerID and conditions (optional small timer to wait on all sensors to update from start). This and external timers with "restore?" is a good practice for automations.

[@smart_home_australia]

Hi MJ, yes afew others mentioned as such, I'm going to implement and report back if I have issues. Thanks for your feedback.

[@schogaia]

I've been looking for "count up timers" (I hope you know what I mean, I'm not a native English speaker) - however those don't seem to exist and I had to resort to some template hacking

[@michaelmaliga815]

I agree. I use timers mostly to track the total ON time of various entities but there is no easy way to set one up in Home Assistant. I like to monitor various systems and have a TTS announcement to tell me the current total run time if it exceeds a certain threshold. I have read several discussions for how to accomplish this if you want to get deep into YAML, templates, and so on but it seems crazy to go down that road when other platforms have this feature built in. I simply use Homeseer for any automation that requires ON time tracking. It literally takes less than a minute to define a new timer in the GUI and that platform handles TTS better than Home Assistant as well.

[@smart_home_australia]

Yes I see what you mean. You can achieve this by using a combination of helpers and automations but it is not a standard feature. You might like to add your "vote" to the feature request for them, check out community.home-assistant.io/t/countup-timer/33644