Monitoring a door sensor

[Ramrock360]

I have one door sensor that I do not want monitored when we have guests. I don’t want it monitored when armed away or armed home. I can manually set this condition in the Ring app for when I know they will be staying with us and change it back when they leave. I have built an automation for certain conditions in the guest house and would like to integrate a command in there to not monitor that door at all when they are there and to monitor it again once they leave.
Is this possible?

[tsightler]

I believe you are asking if you can change the mode settings for a contact sensor via ring-mqtt. The answer is no.

However, you may still be able to mostly achieve what you want, as you can set the bypass mode for the sensor to "Always" and it will bypass that sensor when arming in any mode, thus making it "unmonitored" as far as the alarm is concerned.

[Ramrock360]

This is exactly what I am trying to achieve. I tried that "always" setting but it didn't work. When I read the documentation it seems that the "always" setting is only for bypassing if the door is open while arming. The door is still being monitored once armed.

[tsightler]

No, "Faulted" is for bypassing if the door is open while arming (it's primarily for making it easy to bypass, for example, a window that you might leave open at night if it's cool out), while "Always" is exactly what it says, it always bypasses that sensor. But of course it only happens on new arming, it can't retroactively change the behavior if the system was already armed as bypass happens during arming.

Note however, that bypassing a sensor is completely different that changing the mode so you won't see any changes reflected in the Ring app, although it should display the bypassed sensors on the main screen.

[Ramrock360]

Ok. I will try this again. Maybe I had it in there wrong. I had it set to always. Armed the alarm as home. I then opened that door and the alarm went off. Thank you.

[Ramrock360]

This is what I used that didn't seem to work.

  # Bypass Ring monitoring for pool house door while guests are present

  - service: select.select_option
    target:
      entity_id: select.pool_house_door_bypass_mode
    data:
      option: "Always"