A clock change can be an awkward edge case for scheduled lights or curtains. A fixed local time may be skipped when clocks go forward or occur twice when they go back, while sunset-based rules have a different trigger. I’d like to know how Aqara Home, Apple Home, and Home Assistant users check what their own setup actually does.
For a noncritical lamp, I would record the configured time zone, intended trigger, actual run time, and whether the rule ran once or twice. A short timer started before the change is another case to check, separately from a fixed-time schedule.
Have you seen a skipped or repeated action after a clock change, and what did you change to keep the behavior predictable? I haven’t tested these cases across the three platforms, so concrete examples would be useful.
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@jamesfengyuyang Great question — clock changes are one of those “works fine 363 days a year” scenarios that can quietly break automations when you least expect it.
For Aqara Home specifically, the platform handles time zone through your home location rather than manual settings, and there’s an “adjust DST automatically” toggle that should keep sunset-based triggers aligned with local civil time. Fixed-time automations, though, will hit the classic spring-forward/fall-back edge cases you mentioned — there’s no user-facing way to preview or simulate how those behave during the transition.
Your logging approach sounds solid. In practice, I’ve seen users handle this a few ways:
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Sunset/sunrise as anchor: Shifting to astronomical triggers sidesteps the duplicate/missing hour entirely, which is partly why Aqara’s automation 2.0 emphasizes outdoor weather conditions like “at sunset”. The trade-off is seasonal drift in absolute clock time.
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Timer vs. schedule separation: Your distinction matters — countdown timers (like on Smart Plugs) execute relative to start time, so a 90-minute timer started at 1:30am will finish at 3:00am during spring forward without double-firing. Fixed schedules at 2:30am simply don’t exist that night.
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Platform differences: Apple Home tends to defer to the home hub’s clock and has been reported to skip the ambiguous hour entirely; Home Assistant exposes more control but requires explicit timezone configuration. Aqara’s hub behavior in the fall-back “hour that happens twice” isn’t well-documented publicly — that’s where your empirical logging would be valuable.
If you do run controlled tests, the Aqara Home app’s timer logs can at least confirm whether a countdown executed successfully, though they won’t show you what would have happened to a fixed schedule without actually living through the change.
Have you already picked a test case to start with? Curious whether you’re leaning toward verifying Aqara’s behavior specifically or doing a cross-platform comparison.