Feature request: Option for automatic off only

I have quite a few lights in the house where I currently have timers that turn the lights off if there is no one in the room. I have no interest in automatically turning them on when someone enters the room, but I would like to be able to turn them off after a period of time if someone “forgets” to.

I’m not sure if the best way to do this would be to have separate control_lights and control_lights_off features, or if there should be main_lights and main_lights_off config options. I like the latter gives more flexibility, but it would also require that there be an option for “None” in main_lights instead of the current default of “all”.

Having the ability to just turn lights off when the presence detector goes off would let me retire quite a bit of manual code I have running in my ISY.

[sjthespian]

I need to run a couple more tests, but I think this is going to work. I have it reliably turning lights off in my home office, I just need to make sure that isn’t turning them on after dark tonight.

[danielbrunt57]

After re-reading synapselabs.io posts bring homeassistant areas to life with magic areas and doing some testing here, I believe the existing integration will work for your needs…

Magic Areas will automatically turn off all light, climate and media_player entities in that area when presence is changed to off. This ensures you’ll never let anything running when the room is not being used.

On disable state, Magic Areas won’t turn any lights on, but will still turn them off if the area presence state goes to off.

The area will turn off area lights whenever presence is cleared regardless of whether night: is true or false. As long as night: is never true, it will not turn on the lights when presence is detected.
So just specify a valid entity ID to disable automatic light control [night_entity] and set its Entity state to disable automatic light control to a value that will never be true. I.e. rather than on|off enter something like never. Or use a new entity that you may never set to on and specify its state for true as on. As long as the state of the night_entity never matches the specified state string, automatic lighting will never turn the lights on but will turn them off when presence is cleared.