Gradually turn on lights.

[tamorgen]

Sorry for the delay in responses. I've been traveling, and it's been difficult to do any of the troubleshooting on my iPad

@toggledbits, it's quite the opposite of what you think. The Phones Home rule I mostly use as a rule state for another rule. That other rule is what put's my Home Assistant and Reactor into Home Mode.

When the "Phones Home" rule becomes true, the "GoTo Home Mode" changes settings in the home that puts for the all the other reactions that may or may not occur, depending on time of day, time of year, etc. When the any of the phones leave the geofenced area, and the "guest mode" isn't set (the last of the 6 triggers in the "Phones Home" rule, it reset's the rule state, which changes the House Mode to Away.

Now, here is the real problem I'm having. As I mentioned in the initial post, I have a guest mode specifically for people that need to come in my home, that don't have the Home Assistant companion app, such as a neighbor that I might need to come over and check on our cats while we're gone, or our house cleaner that comes by once a month. They have a code to the alarm system, and I can tell by the user ID on the panel which user disarmed the system. From there, I want to put the system into Guest mode, so the Phone's Home mode won't reset, and the "Arm Away" rule set's the alarm system to Away, which in turn arms the interior motion sensors, and you can see where it would go badly from there.

So, what is happening, is when one of the guest's tries to disable the system, it rearms a minute or so later. The "GoTo Guest Mode" doesn't have a chance to put the "House Mode" into Guest.

Guest Mode does work, if I'm able to have the "House Mode" set to Home first, then change it to Guest, but this unfortunately requires me to be at home to make this work.

You can see below from Home Assistant, that when I'm away, and I try to manually put the House Mode into Guest, it immediately goes back into Away.

In the Reator logs, you can see the immediate reset.

root@hal:/home/tmorgenthaler/reactor/logs# cat reactor.log.1 | grep Phones
[latest-25139]2025-06-16T13:31:47.275Z Rule:INFO Phones Home (rule-grp19i3lbdi in Phone presence) evaluated; rule state transition from RESET to SET!
[latest-25139]2025-06-16T13:31:47.307Z Rule:INFO Phones Home (rule-grp19i3lbdi in Phone presence) evaluated; rule state transition from SET to RESET!
[latest-25139]2025-06-16T13:31:47.316Z Engine:INFO Enqueueing "Phones Home<RESET>" (rule-grp19i3lbdi:R)
[latest-25139]2025-06-16T13:31:47.318Z Engine:NOTICE Starting reaction Phones Home<RESET> (rule-grp19i3lbdi:R)
[latest-25139]2025-06-16T13:31:47.346Z Engine:INFO Resuming reaction Phones Home<RESET> (rule-grp19i3lbdi:R) from step 1
[latest-25139]2025-06-16T13:31:47.346Z Engine:INFO Phones Home<RESET> all actions completed.

The only thing I can think of is there needs to be some sort of delay for the reset in the "Phones Home" rule, but I'm not sure the best way to approach it.

[gwp1]

@tamorgen reading thru this twice (and I may go back again and slow down even more) it sounds like there's no "link" between your rulesets. ie, the conditions for AWAY is being met even though the conditions for GUEST are, too.

What does your AWAY ruleset look like?

Here is my GUEST from AWAY ruleset (I don't have the luxury of surfacing the individual user code so I'm stuck being a bit more generic, ie "lock unlocked". As HOME requires my presence, this has been doing the trick.) My only issue: sometimes the lock is slow to report it's state so I've asked my authorized guests to enter their code, count to 10, the open the door. That let's Hubitat Safety Monitor to disarm.

Here is my Change to AWAY for comparison sake.

@toggledbits gave me very sound advise early on as I was prone to making my rulesets "do too much" in addition to waaaaaay overthinking/overcomplicating things.

Instead of trying to make a ruleset that determines presence AND tries to set mode, just have it determine presence. Have one for your immediate family and one for your guests. Then use the TRUE FALSE state of them in your mode rules. (Saves you countless hours later, too, when you add/remove people from either presence ruleset.)

[tamorgen]

@gwp1 ,
So, the conditions for Away, are essentially the reset of the "Phones Home" rule. If no phones are home, and the conditions for Guest haven't been set, then it's going the "Phones Home" rule becomes false and resets itself.

The Guest mode is met (or supposed to be) when the user code from my home alarm is read for 2 specific user IDs, or I have manually set the mode to Guest from Home Assistant (it's a input select value, the last screen shot in my last post). Unfortunately, this only works properly if someone in the HA companion app users is home to put the mode into Guest.

The Guest mode ends when a HA companion app user arrives back home.

[tamorgen]

This post is deleted!

[tamorgen]

said in Need help figuring out how to delay a reset on reaction:

@gwp1 said in Need help figuring out how to delay a reset on reaction:

@toggledbits gave me very sound advise early on as I was prone to making my rulesets "do too much" in addition to waaaaaay overthinking/overcomplicating things.

Instead of trying to make a ruleset that determines presence AND tries to set mode, just have it determine presence. Have one for your immediate family and one for your guests. Then use the TRUE FALSE state of them in your mode rules. (Saves you countless hours later, too, when you add/remove people from either presence ruleset.)

That is essentially what I'm doing. The "Phones Home" doesn't set the mode, except to reset it. I suppose I could make the reset a separate rule, but I'm not sure how that would solve my problem.

And it's 100% possible I'm overthinking this, or I'm in so deep, that I'm not seeing the obvious. Many of these rules were built on the original Reactor in Vera, before converting to MSR. I had to work with the limitations of Vera at the time, and of course the plug-ins that stopped working quite regularly.

[gwp1]

@tamorgen You're falling into the same pitfalls I did. Notice my Mode SETs don't have resets. No need. The next appropriate rule SETs so there's no reason to reset. Any resets (like from GUEST back to AWAY or VACA) are done via their own SET rulesets.

I don't want to reset... I want to move on to another Mode - even if that mode happens to be the last mode I was in. Make sense?

One thing I have done: every time I change mode I write it to an expression called previous_mode. This let's me do things like "if the previous mode was AWAY, return to AWAY - but if the previous mode was VACA, return to VAC" -- again, these being sep SET rulesets and not RESETs.

Every time I tried to make use of RESETs I got buried as I had too many "what ifs" in my Conditions.

[tamorgen]

@gwp1 said in Need help figuring out how to delay a reset on reaction:

@tamorgen You're falling into the same pitfalls I did. Notice my Mode SETs don't have resets. No need. The next appropriate rule SETs so there's no reason to reset. Any resets (like from GUEST back to AWAY or VACA) are done via their own SET rulesets.

Okay, I think I've made progress thanks to your suggestion.

I took the thought of creating a new rule for "Go to Away Mode", and removed the reset from "Phones Home".

In the new "Go to Away Mode" rule, I added a condition that the mode needs to "Phones Home" rule needs to be sustained for 60 seconds.
This at least makes it specific, as to what my rules do.

Next I tried to toggle the house mode in Home Assistant, and well, it immediately changed to "Home", which is different than what I expected.

So now, the "Go To Home Mode" rule is being tripped. I added a very short 15 second "must be sustained" condition for the "Phones Home" rule state in that rule, and now it lets me change the drop down to Guest Mode. Unfortunately, 15 seconds later, i changes to Home mode, then it changes to Away mode. I feel like this is progress, but I need to figure out why it's not staying in Guest mode

[tamorgen]

Okay, this actually seems to be working. I needed to disarm my home alarm first, then put it in Guest mode. It appears be holding now.

Next test, is I need to disarm the system with one of the guest users to see if it stays disabled.

[tamorgen]

Test appears to be successful. I was able to use one of the guest users PINs for the alarm panel, and the system went into and stayed in Guest mode. Thanks to @gwp1 for reminding me to keep it simple and get rid of the reset.

[gwp1]

@tamorgen said in Need help figuring out how to delay a reset on reaction:

In the new "Go to Away Mode" rule, I added a condition that the mode needs to "Phones Home" rule needs to be sustained for 60 seconds.

Doesn't the result of that mean the system waits for someone to be home for 60 seconds before flipping mode to HOME?

[gwp1]

@tamorgen said in Need help figuring out how to delay a reset on reaction:

Thanks to @gwp1 for reminding me to keep it simple

The thanks goes to @toggledbits who has long endured my questions on things only to have him say "wow... pare this down to smaller bits". Essentially, don't try to do things with "one big beautiful ruleset".

[tamorgen]

@gwp1, no only away. The Home mode is only 15 seconds.

However, since the "Phones Home" rule is a geofence rule (based upon the HA companion app), it detects the phone being there before I'm actually in the house. The Home mode does not disarm the alarm system, that is still manually done at the keypad. The only delay would be lights automatically turning on, or blinds opening during the day.

[tamorgen]

@gwp1 said in Need help figuring out how to delay a reset on reaction:

Essentially, don't try to do things with "one big beautiful ruleset"

Seriously. It can't be done, but sometimes I swear I've paired it down into so many individual functions, I forget how it all works together. When I'm troubleshooting, I have to go back and look at the rules, and think "what was I trying to do here again?"

[tamorgen]

said in Need help figuring out how to delay a reset on reaction:

@gwp1 said in Need help figuring out how to delay a reset on reaction:

Essentially, don't try to do things with "one big beautiful ruleset"

Seriously. It can't be done in one, but sometimes I swear I've paired it down into so many individual functions, I forget how it all works together. When I'm troubleshooting, I have to go back and look at the rules, and think "what was I trying to do here again?"

[toggledbits]

@tamorgen said in Need help figuring out how to delay a reset on reaction:

I have to go back and look at the rules, and think "what was I trying to do here again?"

I have the same problem, and I wrote the darned thing. Use the comments. They really help.

[therealdb]

Also, for me a virtual device instead of checking for rule states seems to be less prone to errors. So I have one for home status, guests, party etc and the rules are much easier to write.

[gwp1]

@therealdb I use those as well. As you see in my AWAY rule there's a catch there using a virtual switch for my calendar integration. If a calendar entry has a specific keyword it turns the switch on. If the switch is on, AWAY knows not to fire.... VACA has it covered.

@toggledbits beat me to it: comments, comments, comments. I've lost too many years off my life trying to remember why this rule does what it does and how.