Automate your laundry room z-wave lighting

[electron]

Squintz has posted an article explaining how to automate your laundry room lighting using your Elk M1 controller and Z-wave hardware.

Home automation is not just for tech-geeks. There can be benefits for the entire family. Take, for example, my laundry room. My wife came to me and asked if I could make the lights come on automatically when she entered the room so she would not have to do a balancing trick with the laundry basket on her knee. Now, I have to admit that I do not do any laundry. In fact my wife refuses to let me touch the laundry. So when she asked me to automate her personal space I was very excited. To solve the problem. I simply added a motion detector to my Elk alarm system and now when motion is detected I have the Elk turn on the light using an Elk Z-Wave controller.

Read the article

 

[gregoryx]

In case anyone's interested, I'm doing the same thing in place but moved the duration to a custom setting so it can be changed from a keypad. I found that as low as 30 seconds may work for many cases, but I will need it longer for other occasions - such as this weekend, when the bar and bartender were in the garage / laundry room. Simply change the custom setting called "Motion Timer" to 300 seconds and all's well. The last rule turns the light on (thus starting the timer) when the door opens.

19   WHENEVER Garage Motion (Zn 15) BECOMES NOT SECURE
     AND GarageLight (Counter 1) IS EQUAL TO 0
          THEN TURN Garage Light [1 (A1)] ON, FADE RATE = 0
20   WHENEVER EVERY 1 SECONDS
     AND Garage Motion (Zn 15) IS NOT SECURE
          THEN SET GarageLight (Counter 1) TO 1
21   WHENEVER EVERY 1 SECONDS
     AND GarageLight (Counter 1) IS NOT EQUAL TO 0
          THEN ADD 1 TO GarageLight (Counter 1)
22   WHENEVER GarageLight (Counter 1) CHANGES TO MotionTimer (Cust
          THEN TURN Garage Light [1 (A1)] OFF, FADE RATE = 
          THEN SET GarageLight (Counter 1) TO 0
23   WHENEVER Garage Door (Zn 14) BECOMES NOT SECURE
          THEN ANNOUNCE Garage Door (Zn 14)
          THEN ANNOUNCE Miscellaneous 9 (vm247)
          THEN TURN Garage Light [1 (A1)] ON, FADE RATE = 0
          THEN SET GarageLight (Counter 1) TO 1

edited to fix formatting

 

[Spanky]

Nice job Squintz. Hope to see more!

 

[Squintz]

gregoryx, thanks for posting that alternate setup.

Spanky, Thank You!

Electron, I already thanked you a few times.

 

[gcimmino]

Squnitz, didn't know you were in the 'hood.

Nice job on the writeup.

Thought you'd like to know, on the BOM page:

http://www.zwaveworld.com/productmatrix.php

The description for the PIR is incorrect and the spec .pdf link is broken.

 

[Squintz]

Thank You. I will let the editor know and will get it fixed.

 

[Squintz]

Z-Wave World has recently published another article of mine. This ARTICLE is a basic introduction to the new xPLZWave Application written by Mal Lansell.