Should I check the state of a switch before sending a command?

[RealBrianWarner (Brian Warner)]

I am looking for input on best practices with a timed motion sensing switch. I’m using an all-Z-Wave setup and OpenHABian on a lightweight x86 box. I have a set of timed motion sensor rules (using the expire binding as documented in @rlkoshak’s design pattern), and they works great.

My question is whether it makes sense, from a technical or practical perspective, to check the state of a switch before I send it an ON command, and only send if the switch is OFF? Put differently, if a motion sensor turns on the light, and repeated motion triggers keep sending more ON commands, does this cause any harm aside from cluttering my log?

[H102 (CM6.5 H102)]

@RealBrianWarner

Put differently, if a motion sensor turns on the light, and repeated motion triggers keep sending more ON commands, does this cause any harm aside from cluttering my log?

No harm and you can filter the log to get rid of all the motion triggers see this link.

openHAB - Filtering event logs

Simple string filtering on the event log. Useful for filtering out high change items that don’t need constant log visibility. Re-posting this as it’s own thread on the recommendation of other members. I also recommend reading Taming openHAB 2 Logging and Log4j2 Sample Config which this was based on. Log configuration data using openhabian-pi is stored in the following file. Location may vary under other installation methods. /srv/openhab2-userdata/etc/org.ops4j.pax.logging.cfg openHAB using …

[rossko57]

@RealBrianWarner

repeated motion triggers keep sending more ON commands, does this cause any harm aside from cluttering my log?

You might also consider the device technology involved; it might be undesirable to repeatedly transmit commands over some wireless tech, or clutter some limited bandwidth channel, etc.