I turned on vacation mode for my color bulb while we have been away. Looking at my camera events playback I see the camera is turning on like at 1am and 3am. This should not be happening. Shouldn’t the light be turning on at normal evening and morning hours? I’ve tried toggling the vacation mode on and off again but it hasn’t fixed it.
If the color bulb is similar to my white bulb vacation mode turns the bulb on and off randomly. Makes it look like someone is moving around the house.
Not sure if your color bulb has the similar settings as my white bulb. If so I can set to dawn/dusk or setup an automation with the exact times I want.
But from what I read on Wyze it’s only supposed to turn on and off randomly between normal hours someone would be actively home. Like breakfast time and evening time. Not 3am!
In my experience, Vacation Mode has always been broken. I’ve tried using it with Bulb Color (both A19 & BR30), Light Strip, Light Strip Pro, and Plug (original), and it has never worked as described. Even when I give the app location permission and enter my home’s specific address at Account ➜ Home, it still triggers lights in the middle of the night, outside the expected hours, which I’ve seen because the lighting changes trigger motion events for indoor cameras. 
I opened a ticket with Support about it last year. It closed without resolution. 
I wish I had a solution for you, @sockofrog. I certainly don’t think Automations are the answer, because that doesn’t offer random activation of lights and kind of defeats the purpose. If someone has a good working fix, I’m interested.
I stand corrected.
My expectations were complete randomness, as if people were moving about the house anytime at night. Both my Wyze white bulbs and Kasa color bulbs seemed to meet my expectations.
Your expectations and the documented explanation were only during a prescribed time period. @Crease, thanks for the pointer to the Getting Started. I found the same explanation in the white bulb getting started.
What intrigued me was the automation. Essential Automations to Try lists “On Vacation”. I can’t remember if I used this or not. What I didn’t realize is a schedule based automation cannot run a shortcut. If it could then this issue would be easy to solve.
As an aside I remember a few years ago moving to allowing Alexa to control the lights. Just recently Amazon deprecated the command to do this (we’re home/we’re away).
Oh well. For once a Wyze bug has turned out to be a feature for me😊
My understanding is that it’s supposed to be random during certain hours, and that’s not the behavior I’ve observed. When @sockofrog mentioned lights turning on at 3:00 a.m., I identified with that, because that’s been my experience, and it’s not the effect I would want Vacation Mode to achieve.
Wyze really seems to struggle with time-based features/functions of their devices, and I’m not sure why.
I don’t have any of the Kasa bulbs, but I have some of their smart switches, and those have worked as expected when I’ve set them for “Away Mode”. They do what I want the Wyze gear to do.
I’m not sure what you mean by this:
I’m not sure how it would be possible to achieve the desired randomness of activity to mimic human presence if it’s being controlled by a schedule. I think I’m not getting what you’re saying here. 
I never used the Alexa feature you described. I think I read about it after they’d already taken it away. 
If I look in my Automations there is a pre-canned automation that is identified as a Preset Shortcut labeled “On Vacation”. Looks like the following. I may have modified it. 3 year old memory.
This enables all my lights to Vacation Mode. The problem is I cannot find a way to trigger it automatically using an Automation. If we could it would be trivial to trigger at a certain time and then have an inverse Automation that turns off Vacation Mode at a certain time.
Actually this would be more flexible than a Preset time as explained in the Getting Started docs. It could take into account what if user is working a swing or graveyard shift. Maybe a multi family home, or situations outside the “typical” home.
Anyway, I learned something new and I’ll have to put it on my radar as Alexa is not going to help (yet).
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Does anyone from Wyze follow these boards and respond? I mean that’s a pretty bad bug that it works totally opposite the way they say it’s supposed to
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Your memory is a toddler? 
I get what you mean. I’ve seen that, too, and it’s cool that it’s there to enable Vacation Mode for devices that have that feature, but the operation of the feature itself is still broken and doesn’t respect the time windows when it’s supposed to be operating—at least not in my experience.
Right, as I understand it you can’t have one Automation be an “Action” of another Automation. That would be a cool idea, though. I was going to suggest that you request this in the Wishlist, but I see that it’s already there:
You can already do this by writing your own Automations. You can create Schedules and use the “Turn on vacation mode” and “Turn off vacation mode” Actions for devices that support it, but you’d have to do this for each device instead of just calling the existing Shortcut. Basically you’d recreate what the Shortcut does in a separate Automation but just make it a Schedule type.
That still doesn’t fix the problem, though. If I set one Schedule to turn on Vacation Mode for my lights starting at 6:00 p.m. and another to turn off Vacation Mode at 11:00 p.m. but that same Vacation Mode doesn’t activate the lights within those times (which are already the times for one of the stated windows, according to Wyze’s documentation), then I haven’t really accomplished anything. If Vacation Mode wants to turn on lights at 3:00 a.m. when it’s turned on but I’m using a Schedule to keep it off at that time, then I get that the lights won’t be turning on overnight when I don’t want them to, but I’m still not getting the lights to turn on when I do want them to.
I think what you’re suggesting is a partial work-around, and I can see how that might help with the overnight hours, but it doesn’t fix the issue where Vacation Mode already is not turning on lights when it should during the morning and evening hours, as it’s supposed to do.
I’m glad you replied, because it made me think through this a little more, and I see what you’re saying. It’s just not a complete solution and doesn’t fix Wyze’s issues with time-based features. (There are currently active topics about users seeing calendar days not matching with days of the week and users in time zones with 30-minute offsets having their cameras misbehave because Wyze hasn’t correctly addressed time.)
Not officially, no, at least not as I understand it. This is primarily a user-to-user support community, though some Wyze Team members do occasionally comment in various topics. I think primarily they track the Wyze News, Beta, and Wishlist categories; others are hit-or-miss.
To keep this on their radar, I’d probably start with reproducing the issue, submitting a log, and then opening a ticket that references the Log ID. That’s what I did last year. Support will tell you that they can’t access the logs, but those are supposed to go to the engineers, and I try to drive home the point with Support that I want the information in the ticket linked to whatever logs I’ve submitted (using the Log ID) so that the developers have a full description of the problem.
I’m also hopeful that fix-it-friday will return at some point, because this is an issue I’d like to see get more attention and a full resolution.
I have an original Wyze plug that is stuck on GMT internally I think (immune to my attempts to reset it.) It started vacay at 1am PT and sometime in the afternoon, IIRC. I retired it from vacay duties but it works fine otherwise. 
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Understood. It’s on my radar as Alexa can’t help me, at least the way I’ve been doing it.
I’ll explore your suggestion doing an automation one device at a time. Think I explored that a while back and decided it wasn’t worh writing 13 separate automations.
I figured 3 years was remembering good. I’m at that stage in life where I can remember something that happened half a century ago but can’t remember what I had for breakfast. 
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It’s not, and that’s not what I’m suggesting. In your screenshot above, the Shortcut will execute multiple Actions—one for each bulb in the list—with a single Automation. That’s what I’m suggesting: You can recreate that same thing as a single Schedule Automation with those same multiple Actions. That’s doable, but it still doesn’t solve the problem of Vacation Mode not respecting its stated time parameters.
I don’t know what time these devices “think” it is or what time zone(s) Wyze’s servers have determined for the devices’ location, and that’s what I find particularly frustrating, because I imagine this feature must work for some users, but I don’t understand why my lights turn on at odd times after I’ve explicitly given the app my physical address.
I feel ya. 
Knowing when to quit (‘retire’ something) is requisite in Wyztopia, IMO.
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So what I believe your saying is you can write the automation (I did a quick one) but what Wyze does with vacation mode is unpredictable. It may be all over the place.
Just out of curiosity I’m going to try a small automation that includes the 3 bulbs in the living room, turning on a sunset and turning off at sunrise. I want to see what happens.
Of course we may discover that it works and just as we’re smiling Wyze fixes it.
Stay tuned.
Essentially, yeah, or at least that’s been my experience. Because of the times that I’ve personally observed lights and plugs turning on and off when Vacation Mode is enabled—outside the 0600-0900 and 1800-2300 local time windows—I would say that it’s not only unpredictable but also unreliable. Some unpredictability should be part of the design, because that’s the randomness that I would expect from a feature that isn’t merely scheduled in a regular way but is supposed to activate devices unpredictably within the constraints of the local time windows. That’s just not what it’s doing in my observation.
I’ll be interested to read what you learn in your testing.
Now that I’m thinking about this again—and thanks for getting me annoyed on a Wednesday, @sockofrog![1]—I’m wondering if I should do more of my own testing, then submit a log to Wyze when the feature fails, then open another ticket, then ask the Support agent(s) if it’s possible to find out from the engineer(s) what the log says about the affected device’s time. That could be a pointer to the problem.
Part of my puzzlement with this “feature”, too, is that I’m not sure if it’s something that is supposed to execute locally on the device itself (in which case I would expect the clock on the chip driving the device to be a main culprit) or if it’s like Automations that run from Wyze servers (which I think would explain a lot for Vacation Mode apparently malfunctioning and for the time-based problems other users have described). I’m guessing it’s the latter, because it’s possible to throw several bulbs into a group and then enable Vacation Mode for that group (rather than individual bulbs), but that’s all it is for me at this point: A guess.
Also, how cool is it that half of the contributors to this topic are 
s? Or maybe I’m reading @sockofrog’s name wrong. In my head it’s like “socko frog” or “sock o’frog”, but I suppose it could just as easily be “sock of rog”, like Rog’s 
.
Probably time for me to change my Profile Picture again and get some lunch.
My annoyance is with Wyze, not with you at all! ↩︎
Tying up a loose end.
Last evening I ran the automation for a few hours in the evening. Had 5 cams in Vacation Mode.
Not one bulb came on. You and the OP are right. It’s broken.
This is on my radar but low priority. Descriptive Notifications is using up to much of my time😕
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Thanks for the follow-up. I appreciate the confirmation and the effort you put into it. 
It’s been low priority for me, too, but if I traveled more then I’d have a greater itch to see this fixed. I might open another ticket anyway just to bug them about making some progress with it. Lately when I’ve done that, I’ve specifically linked certain Forum posts, hoping that they’ll have a better understanding of the problem being discussed.
Descriptive Alerts were cool when they had that β open. I can see some utility in that, and I hope they get the bird detection working better for y’all with the feeders.
FWIW…
When Vacation Mode is operating correctly (during the 6-9a and 6-llp periods only) this automation shuts off the lights if it’s daylight:
At the moment, 8-11p is the only period they stay on.
Are you saying Vacation Mode does work? I had 5 white bulbs in Vacation Mode from 6-11pm. None ever came on.
