Rehearsal and arming — how an automation goes live safely

A new action never touches a device on day one. It starts in rehearsal: the plant evaluates it against live readings and keeps a diary of every decision it would have made — without switching anything. You arm it only after the diary convinces you.

Rehearsal — watch it decide before it acts

While rehearsing, the action runs on every reading cycle exactly as it would live. Each evaluation lands in the decision log:

09:42 — Would have switched ON — battery 67%, solar 3.1 kW (conditions held 10 min) 21:18 — Would have switched OFF — solar below 500 W for 10 min

Read the log across at least one full day-cycle. You’re checking three things:

1. It turns on when you’d expect (morning ramp-up, battery recovering).
2. It turns off when you’d expect (sunset, or the bailout condition).
3. It holds overnight — no surprise decisions while you sleep.

If a decision looks wrong, edit the thresholds and let it rehearse again. Rehearsal costs nothing and can run as long as you like.

Arming

The Arm button enables after the action has rehearsed for at least 24 hours — enough to see a full day and night of decisions. Arming shows a confirmation that restates the guard settings before you commit:

• Minimum on/off time — no rapid cycling (default 10–15 minutes).
• Auto-off timer — every “on” carries a built-in expiry (default 45 minutes), renewed while conditions still hold. If the site loses internet, the load switches itself off instead of running unattended — this matters most on off-grid plants where an unattended load can drain the batteries overnight.
• Bailout — the hard cut-off that overrides everything (for example, battery at or below 60%).

Once armed, the same decision log keeps recording — now showing real switch events instead of “would have.”

Pausing and disarming

You can pause an armed action at any time — it stops issuing commands and stops evaluating entirely, so no new decisions (real or “would have”) are logged while paused.

Un-pausing (Resume rehearsal) returns the action to rehearsal, not straight back to live — re-arming is a separate, deliberate click that restates the guard settings again, same as arming the first time. It does not require a fresh 24-hour wait, though: the rehearsal clock is based on your decision history, not on the action’s current state, so the earlier rehearsal you already completed still counts.

Who sees this

Automations are installer-facing. Homeowners don’t see the Automations tab or the decision log.

What if the internet drops while a load is on?

Nothing keeps the load running: the auto-off timer lives on the switching device itself, so it expires and the load turns off even with the cloud unreachable. When the connection returns, the action resumes normally.

Where to go next

• plant-automations-overview — the Automations tab as a whole