Do Action if variable is still the same after five minutes

Hi all,
I'm on the case detecting the power usage of a tumble dryer so that five minutes after power usage drops to less than 5 watts Indigo sends me a message to say that the Drying is finished.

I can set the variable TumbleDryerOn to be true and false based on the power usage no problem, the bit I don't know how to do is to check after five minutes if the variable is still false so as to then send the message.

Reason I want the delay is sometimes the dryer pauses and changes direction which I have a suspicion will result in 0W for a few seconds.

Can anyone help me out?!

Thanks
Noel

Others will correct me if I have missed anything, but I would attempt to tackle this by creating a Timer device that is set to 5 minutes. Whenever you variable changes to "false", you will start the timer... any time it goes to true (meaning the dryer is on) you will stop the timer in case it is running from a "pause" as you think may happen. When the timer completes you know that it has been off 5 minutes from having going to "false" and can send the notification.

Adam

Hi Adam,
Perfect thanks, I knew there was some nugget of knowledge I was missing! That's working perfectly.

Cheers for the awesomely fast response!

Noel

Nice, can you do a scream dump how you did, is new on this...

tumble dryer actions.tiff (281.48 KiB) Viewed 4294 times

tumble dryer triggers.tiff (306.03 KiB) Viewed 4294 times

Two screenshots hopefully attached!

The first shows the conditions, the second the actions for the three triggers.

So what happens is as follows

When power consumption of tumble dryer goes above 500W (it normally sits about 0.2W when off) make variable TumbleDryer = On AND stop timer

When power consumption of tumble dryer goes below 5W make variable TumbleDryer = Off AND start timer TumbleDryerOffFor5Minutes with start time of 5 minutes.

When timer reaches 0 send email notifications to boxcar which then sends push notifications to our phones.

The reason for the timer and not simply sending a notification as soon as power drops is sometimes it will pause for a little while change direction etc.

This means that when it stops, timer starts, if it starts again timer stops and resets.

Once its been stopped for 5 minutes notifications are sent.

Hope this helps

Cheers

Noel

Thanks Noel,

Try it to day...



//Jens

Noel,
You have a Pause trigger whats that??

I think that's from when I was getting to grips with the timers and figuring out how best to set this up. It's no longer required! Good spot
Cheers

OK, now it works

so how would I get it to work for multiple variables still the same?

I get the gist of the preceding posts. But I'm using the beacon plugin and geohopper and I need the timer to start (20 minutes) once indigo sees my phone and my wife's phone are away. Once the 20 minutes are up and we are both still away, I want to change my heating and cooling settings.

Something along the lines of

When person 1 away check if person 2 away, If yes start timer

And vice versa if person 2 away check if person 1 away, if yes start timer

When timer reaches 0 turn off heating etc

When person 1 or 2 comes home then stop/reset timer, that then covers you if someone leaves and comes back quickly.

There may be better ways to do this so I'm sure more experienced minds will be along soon!

each of your phone should start a trigger with a delayed action (20 minutes) if they are away, with condition that the other is away too.
if one of them comes back online you trigger a server/removed delayed action that removes the delayed action from the triggers above.

So I guess you would need 4 triggers, 2 for each phone: offline and back online.. off line starts a DELAYED action and online kills these actions.
and the action group should be a common action group i.e. change heater to away.


Another way could be to have one variable that gets increased / decreased by your phones changing to offline / online & condition:
one trigger checking if variable =2 then start delayed action group..
one trigger checking if variable <2 then kill delayed action group


no matter what I guess you need 4+ triggers.

Karl

ok thanks. I think I have it.
Before my post, I had 5 triggers set up. 2 for each phone, 1 for being home, 1 for being away. The 5th would tell indigo to switch my housemode variable to vacation after we have been gone for twenty minutes.

So I used Karl's suggestion and created another variable, Phones not home. As each phone leaves the variable increases by 1 and decreases by 1 when each one returns home. When the value reaches 2, the 20 minute timer begins.

After 20 minutes that 5th trigger would kick in.

The more I look at it now, I only need the one variable, Phonesnothome. I'm also using the Myphone and myifesphone to show True or False depending on if we are present or absent. Phonesnothome is doing the triggering at a value of 2. The other two really aren't contributing to what I want done.