Automagic Forum

In a flow I need to use fairly long timeouts, around 5 or 10 minutes. The flow may possibly run dozens of times a day.

So I can either use a "Sleep" action (without keeping awake) or calculate the target time in advance, store it in a global variable and enable a second flow with a "Global Variable Date/Time" trigger on that variable.

Somewhere in the forums or in the help I've read that it is advisable to keep the running time of a flow as short as possible to conserve battery power.
So I would assume that the "Global Variable Date/Time" variant is much more efficient on longer timeouts?

Action Sleep (without keeping awake) is an exception to the rule since it will not keep the device awake but will register an alert so that the device is woken up and the flow is continued after the sleep. From a battery point of view it should be comparable with a trigger Periodic Timer or the Global Variable Date/Time variant.
However I recommend to use a trigger Periodic Timer Inexact for flows which are executed on a regular basis to save battery (or Periodic Timer for shorter time intervals) since it's easier to turn such a flow off at night with an action Set Flow State: Disable xyz. Additionally the flow is not constantly showing up as red in the list and the flow statistics properly increases the execution count of the flow.