Unfortunately, our house does not have eves, so if we are going out, and there is any hint that it may rain that day, we have to close all the windows. In a climate that is often in the 30’s ©, with very high humidity, this is not ideal. At some point, I will get roller shutters on some of the windows.
I will have a rule that if rain is detected, close the shutters. Another rule will open the shutters 5 minutes after the rain stops. I probably will also have a rule that closes the shutters if lightning is 5kms away, that would re-open them if lightning hadn’t been detected for 30 minutes, and it rain hasn’t been detected for 5 minutes.
I also want a rule where; if music is playing on the Pool/BBQ Sonos, and lightning is detected, pause the music, speak a message, and then resume playback. I would have different messages for the different lightning steps (>35kms, 20km, 10km, 5kms), and would set conditions so that a message would only interrupt once for each distance, apart from the 5km one.
I will do the automation with SmartThings and webCoRE. webCoRE is an incredibly powerful rule engine designed for SmartThings. There isn’t much condition wise it can’t seem to do in the short time I have been using it.
As far as it being cloud-based, we don’t really get internet dropouts - not that I have seen over the past 14 years I’ve lived here. Usually only if you are changing service providers, you may not have internet for a few days while the change over is happening. SmartThings is known to go offline occasionally, and power is very occasionally lost in major storms. If we were going out for a whole day, and thunderstorms were forecast, we would probably close the windows anyway, so that’s not really a problem, so feel confident enough in the technology.