hucker
Active Member
I've been playing around with interior motion sensors and occupancy sensing. The more I think about it the less I want to do it :blink:
At first it seems really cool to be able to turn lights on, only at night, when certain motions are detected. That I can do but man does it start to get complicated.
For example we have 4 bedrooms upstairs and a long hallway with a bathroom off of it. We have little kids, so it would be nice if they came out of thier rooms and motion was detected that the hall light and bathroom light would turn on dim.
1) What times should this happen.
2) What should we do about the current state of the lights.
3) Should they auto turn off after a period of inactivity.
Now add to this that there are stairs at the end of the hall...
4) Do I need to turn on the stair lights too? Timer?
If I do try to time things then certainly I need to keep watching the motion sensor so I don't turn things off when people are around... sort of a watchdog thing.
Who is doing this stuff? How complex did you have to get to make it useful...
The things I have to track occupancy are door sensors, motion sensors, lights turning on/off, alarm system state and MAYBE PC screen saver state. I can tell when the phones are off the hook too but I can't see how I could use that to determine anything useful since I don't know which phone...
I do have one success on the automated lights and that is the ones that come on when you open various doors.
Thoughts?
At first it seems really cool to be able to turn lights on, only at night, when certain motions are detected. That I can do but man does it start to get complicated.
For example we have 4 bedrooms upstairs and a long hallway with a bathroom off of it. We have little kids, so it would be nice if they came out of thier rooms and motion was detected that the hall light and bathroom light would turn on dim.
1) What times should this happen.
2) What should we do about the current state of the lights.
3) Should they auto turn off after a period of inactivity.
Now add to this that there are stairs at the end of the hall...
4) Do I need to turn on the stair lights too? Timer?
If I do try to time things then certainly I need to keep watching the motion sensor so I don't turn things off when people are around... sort of a watchdog thing.
Who is doing this stuff? How complex did you have to get to make it useful...
The things I have to track occupancy are door sensors, motion sensors, lights turning on/off, alarm system state and MAYBE PC screen saver state. I can tell when the phones are off the hook too but I can't see how I could use that to determine anything useful since I don't know which phone...
I do have one success on the automated lights and that is the ones that come on when you open various doors.
Thoughts?