Thanks for all the help Josh. I was able to get these working by setting the default value of the tiles to 0 and the trigger to if $var changes and is not 0. I can enter the values as a whole number or as 4 digits.
A little context of what I was working on…
A while back when Webcore shutdown for SmartThings, I replicated an alarm clock rule into Sharptools. This wasn’t ideal as I had to use static variables for each possible time. Over time, I ended up with about 20 variables just for times and each variable required 4 rules (80+ rules total). This did not include the other variables used in the rules.
I have now recreated the alarm clock that plays announcements over Alexa, turns stuff on, sets the thermostat an hour before the alarm goes off in the winter and when the alarm goes off the rest of the year. I have maximum flexibility for the timing by using 1 variable where I can select the number of hours before the alarm goes off, i.e. 8 hours, and the other where I can enter the actual time for the alarm to go off, i.e. 6am.
I have now combined this into 15 variables and 12 total rules, including the 2 you are helping me with which simply display the time the alarm will go off on a dashboard (not critical to the alarm function) and a rule that resets everything when I get up.
As I said, I have them working for now and am pretty happy with the outcome but I would still like to understand why setting the trigger as updates and is not {{}} (blank space) or changes to not {{}} (blank space) would not trigger the rule when a value was entered in the variable? I was reading through some older posts and found this exact suggestion.
I tried setting the default variable value to blank space by manual input and from a rule using {{}}, {{ }}, and expression input of "", and " ". The rules would not register a variable change when a number was entered in the variable but would occasionally trigger the rule when the variable was cleared.
Again Josh, thank you for all the help!