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.

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

[image] ronl4625: 3 year old memory. Your memory is a toddler? :wink: 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. [image] ronl4625: The problem is I cannot find a way to trigger it automatically using an Automation. 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: [image]Add More Actions for Wyze Automations (Rules) General Execute an existing Shortcut (button) [image] ronl4625: 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. 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.) [image] sockofrog: Does anyone from Wyze follow these boards and respond? 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 #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. :man_shrugging:

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. :cooking::hot_beverage::bacon::honey_pot::grin:

[image] ronl4625: I explored that a while back and decided it wasn’t worh writing 13 separate automations. 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. [image] peepeep: stuck on GMT internally I think 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. :confused::man_shrugging:

[image] Crease: :confused::man_shrugging: I feel ya. :slight_smile: Knowing when to quit (‘retire’ something) is requisite in Wyztopia, IMO. :man_shrugging: [image] Grid selection for Detection Zone removed from V1&V2 cameras Cameras They need some sort of process to completely wipe the cams, load the firmware fresh from SD card, and ensure no settings are inherited from the cloud. I believe that may have actually been possible back in the days when the wyze mini hacks worked fully. From various threads here it seems some issues somehow get "stuck’ in specific cams and don’t have any relation to firmware or app version…

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.

[image] ronl4625: 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. 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. :man_shrugging: Also, how cool is it that half of the contributors to this topic are :frog: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 :socks:. Probably time for me to change my Profile Picture again and get some lunch. :grin: 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😕

Thanks for the follow-up. I appreciate the confirmation and the effort you put into it. :+1: 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.

Vacation mode behavior not right!

Power & Lighting

peepeep June 4, 2025, 6:46pm 13

I feel ya.

Knowing when to quit (‘retire’ something) is requisite in Wyztopia, IMO.

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Vacation mode behavior not right!

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