Timer's and OH2 Restarts

[rlkoshak (Rich Koshak)]

@ptmuldoon

it appears the timer is gone on the reboot.

That is correct.

@ptmuldoon

So is a better/simpler approach to just have 2 separate rules to turn the light on at 5pm and Off 7 hours later at midnight or 12 am?

For this use case where the on and off times are static I would say yes.

@dynostatic

Unfortunately, timers don’t survive a restart. That would be a cool feature that really should exist. I try to use cron triggers as much as possible for this reason.

You can get that behavior with Design Pattern: Expire Binding Based Timers and persistence.

If you persist this Item:

Switch ChristmasTimer {expire="7h,command=OFF"}

Then you can use these rules:

rule "Reset timer"
when
    System started
then
    ChristmasTimer.sendCommand(ChristmasTimer.previousState)
end

rule "Turn on lights"
when
    Time cron "0 0 17 ? * *"
then
    // turn on the lights

    ChristmasTimer.sendCommand(ON)
end

rule "Turn off the Christmas Lights"
when
    Item ChristmasTimer received command OFF
then
    // turn off the lights
end