Advanced Use Cases Door Open Lockout Suppression

Suppress closing while a door is open (anti-lockout)

A common safety request: "Don't let the blind close over a terrace or balcony door while that door is open — I don't want to get locked out." This works today with no code changes. The building block is a single Custom Position slot triggered by the door contact, holding the cover fully open for as long as the door is open.

When the door closes, the slot steps aside and the integration resumes normal adaptive tracking, returning the cover to its sun/climate-calculated position.

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The recipe in one slot

Open your cover's options and configure one of the ten Custom Position slots:

Setting	Value
Trigger Sensors	your door contact, e.g. binary_sensor.terrace_door
Custom Position	100 (fully open)
Priority	100 (recommended for a safety use case — see below)
Minimum Mode	Off

Most door contacts report on when the door is open, which is exactly the trigger you want: door open → slot active → cover held at 100% → no close.

If your door entity reports the reverse (on = closed), invert it with a Template binary sensor or a device_class helper, then point the slot's Trigger Sensor at the inverted entity.

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Choosing the priority

The priority decides which other behaviours your anti-lockout rule overrides, and whether it works around the clock. For reference, the relevant slice of the priority chain:

Weather(90) → Manual(80) → Custom(1–100) → Motion(75) → Cloud(60) → Climate(50) → Glare(45) → Solar(40) → Default(0)

Priority	Beats	Time window	Use when
77 (default)	solar, climate, cloud, motion	Only inside the schedule window	The door is only relevant during the day and you're fine deferring to the window
95	also manual override (80) and motion timeout (75)	Only inside the schedule window	You want the held-open position to survive a manual nudge, but still only during scheduled hours
100 (safety)	everything below Weather(90); also fires outside the schedule window, bypasses the delta-position and delta-time send gates, and is retried by the reconciliation loop	Any hour, including at night	Recommended for true anti-lockout — the door can be open at dusk or after the window closes, and you want zero latency

For a safety-grade lockout guard, priority 100 is the right choice: the original request was specifically about not getting locked out, and that can happen after the tracking window has closed. A slot at priority 77 deliberately does not fire outside the start/end window, so it would leave the door unprotected in the evening. See Safety Priority for the full semantics.

Weather safety and the door slot. A priority-100 custom slot evaluates above the Weather(90) storm-protection handler, so at 100 your door guard wins even during a weather-safety close. If you'd rather let a storm close take precedence over an open door, drop the slot to 85 (below Weather, above Manual) — the door is then held open in normal conditions but a weather-safety event can still close it. For most balcony-door setups, never closing over an open door is the safer default, so 100 is the recommended choice.

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What happens when the door closes

The moment the door contact returns to off, the Custom Position handler produces no result and the pipeline falls through to whichever handler is next — normally solar or climate. The cover moves back to its calculated position immediately: on release, a priority-100 slot bypasses the delta gates so there's no throttling delay returning to the tracked position.

The slot also fires regardless of the Automatic Control toggle — a sensor-triggered override is treated as an explicit user intent — so the door guard protects you even while sun tracking is paused.

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Holding a partial position instead of fully open

If you don't want the blind to travel all the way up — say you want it to stop at a height that still clears the door track but keeps some shade — set Custom Position to that value (e.g. 60) instead of 100, and turn on Minimum Mode. In minimum mode the cover won't drop below that height while the door is open, but solar tracking can still raise it further. Without minimum mode the slot pins the exact position.

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Diagnosing the behavior

Check sensor.{your_device}_decision_trace. While the door is open you should see custom_position as the active handler, naming your door sensor. When the door closes, the trace switches to solar, climate, or default. The Panel Card shows the same trace visually.

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Related pages

• Custom Position: full slot configuration reference (trigger sensors, priority, minimum mode, safety priority)
• How It Decides: full priority chain explanation
• Weather Safety: storm-protection handler at priority 90
• Bedroom Sleep Mode: a related Custom Position recipe (hold closed on a schedule)
• Advanced Use Cases: all advanced use case recipes