We have a basement door lock. This lock has an internal switch, which we have enabled. This causes the door to lock 30 seconds after it was opened. 90+% of the time, this is great.

However, when we have people over (I know, not often with covid, but Spring should be here soon...), my wife would like to have the door remain open for a while.  She keeps dry wood in the basement, and this allows her to go in an out to get kindling. 

We can easily disable this switch.

My questions:

1) If you don't enable a 30 second automatic lock, and use the ISY 994i to do this, what timing do you use and how do you do it?

2) Do you have some type of "having people over" program, to enable the lock to be open longer?  If so, what timing do you use and how do you do it?

3) Do you enable #2 via Alexa? 

Thank you.

In my last house, I had 4 door locks.  The basement door would always be left unlocked.  

What I did in this case was create a state variable (that I could toggle) that was called sGuest.  When sGuest = 0 (false), there were several items that all had to be true to run a timer.  When sGuest = 1, it did not run the program.

If

sGuest = 0 AND lock.basement = false AND door.basement.open = false

Then

wait (# of minutes)

lock.basement = true

32 minutes ago, ctviggen1 said:

My questions:

1) If you don't enable a 30 second automatic lock, and use the ISY 994i to do this, what timing do you use and how do you do it?

2) Do you have some type of "having people over" program, to enable the lock to be open longer?  If so, what timing do you use and how do you do it?

3) Do you enable #2 via Alexa? 

I have a program that locks my doors 10 minutes after they have been closed. I use a door sensor to make sure the lock doesn't lock when the door is open. I also have program that runs in the evening that checks to make sure the doors are locked and if they aren't locked they are locked. Alexa announces that the house is secure after the evening lock check is completed. I don't have a program for when we have guests. It could easily be done by having a program that disables the locking program. This program could be enabled through Alexa if you wanted to do that. I use Alexa only to check the status of my locks and to lock the lock. I don't use Alexa to unlock the door locks.

Thanks for those comments, they were helpful.

Sorry, I finally got around to doing this, since we had two sets of kids over. One set (older) was in the garage.  One set (younger) was watching a moving outdoors on the projector. The projector screen was set up right near and in front of the basement door.  We walked around the screen and into the basement, but had to enter in a code every time. 

I disabled the "lock after 30 seconds" mode on the door lock.  (This is a switch you have to move.)

I set a program to lock the door 10 minutes after it's unlocked. Call this the "normal" program.

I'd love not to use Alexa to operate the doors, but I don't know how else to make it easy for my wife to use.

Right now, I have one program (enabled via Alexa) set to disable the "normal" program for 3 hours, then lock the door and re-enable the "normal" program.

I have another program (enabled via Alexa) to lock the door and re-enable the "normal" program.

I have another program that locks the door at night.  Since we were out until about 10pm last night, I chose that time.

Dbuss, what kind of door sensor are you using?

If anyone has any ideas as to how to make this safer, I'm all ears.  I'd love to not use Alexa, but I don't know how to achieve that while making it easy for my wife to use.  I could set up a variable and run it, but even I would likely forget how to do that for the few times we do this.  (I could be wrong, but we've had people over outdoors only twice since the pandemic started, once last year and once this year.  We obviously think this will happen more often, but in CT, it's luck that you get a good night with no wind to allow you to have movies outdoors.)

What I ended up doing was create a "basement access" program.  So, we can say "enable basement access" (or "turn on basement access") or "disable basement access" (or "turn off basement access".  It's basically like this for the program, where "normal locking program" locks the door after 10 minutes:

Basement access {

If { }

then { Disable Normal locking program, wait 3 hours, lock the door, enable Normal locking program }

else { Enable Normal locking program, lock the door }

}

For the lock I bought, I believe it only locks electronically via Zwave but does not unlock via Zwave.  You have to enter a code to get it to unlock.