Routines & Automations Not Working

Every smart home owner eventually hits the same wall: the routine that worked flawlessly last week silently stops firing, or worse, triggers at 3 a.m. for no discernible reason. This hub is your field manual for those exact moments. Across 22 articles, we dissect why automations fail across the three dominant ecosystems—Alexa, Google Home, and Home Assistant—and for every major device category: bulbs, plugs, switches, locks, doorbells, and lights. You won’t find generic “reboot your router” advice here; you’ll find symptom-specific diagnostics, from sunset-triggered routines that ignore daylight saving changes to smart locks that refuse to arm when you leave the house.

This section is built for the hands-on troubleshooter who owns the problem, not the casual buyer. Whether you’re a beginner who just installed your first smart plug or a tinkerer running a complex Home Assistant YAML setup, the step-by-step guides meet you at your level. If you’re chasing a specific failure, jump straight to the device and platform combo that matches your setup—for example, “Smart Bulb Routine not Working Google Home” walks you through permission resets and cloud sync checks, while “Smart Switch Routine not Working Home Assistant” dives into integration state mismatches. If you’re newer to automation logic, start with the three informational overviews—particularly “Automation Fired at 3am for No Reason”—to understand how triggers, conditions, and time zones interact before you touch any settings. You’ll learn why a routine can appear active but be silently disabled by a firmware update, and how a single misconfigured “sunset offset” can cascade into every evening light failing. By the end, you’ll stop guessing and start tracing the exact failure point, whether it’s a stale token, a missing device report, or a hub that lost its time sync. The articles below are ordered to let you drill down from broad ecosystem issues to device-specific fixes, so pick your platform, find your gadget, and let’s get your automations firing on schedule again.

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