Occupancy Sensors For HA

[rhughes]

In general, as we move through the house lights come on and then fade off over 30 seconds (halls), 60 seconds (living areas) and 5 minutes (kitchen). Bathrooms also have door sensors so the lights stay on when the doors are closed. When a person enters a living area, then the light switch can be turned on, which disables the motion rules.

Randy,

How do you have your system setup so that you can tell if the person wants to override the automation?

I've been trying to grapple with this, I think what I'm going to do is use 90% for automation and 100% for person (something like that).

I had a long conversation with jwilson56 about this, where he is actually doing exactly what I wanted. He was using this Motion Sensor. The website says motion, but he told me that they are VERY sensative. I wanted something that (as he did) triggered with "just a finger" moving. My issue with doing this exactly like jwilson56 is that he uses a different automation software, which allows him to exploit the way how UPB interacts with his setup. I'm using Homeseer, so I have not been able to easily identify a way to tell if the "on" came from HS or from a switch that someone pushed (without re-writing a lot of code, to set a variable if the trigger was automated and not from a person).

--Dan

Hi Dan,

Sorry for being so late in replying; I just saw your post with the new post.

When motion is detected in a room (some rooms have multiple motion sensors for better coverage), then a rule checks to see if the lights in that room are all off, including the light controlled by the motion sensor(s). If they are, then the controlled light is ramped up quickly (.5 seconds), a delay of 2 seconds occurs, and then turned off with a fade of 30 seconds to 5 minutes depending on the room. During the fade off period, the system sees the light as OFF, so if another motion event is detected, the light is turned on again and then fades off. This is a nice effect as we move through the house. This also tends to keep the kitchen light on when we're in there since it's fade off period is 5 minutes. If a light is turned on in the room, then the motion rule will detect this the next time it is triggered and the event ignored. I used to have this setup in HomeSeer but moved the logic to the ISY when I started using that.

Randy

 

[kwilcox]

My home system is massively dependent on motion detection for automatic lighting control. No sensor controlled area in our house has a no-motion light-off delay of > 5 minutes, even the bathrooms. Most are set at 2 minutes. See my showcase thread for the details on how I do this with high WAF. The Ademco/Honeywell sensors that I recently installed are amazing. Since going to these, my system has been running pretty much flawlessly.

In my own experience, the key to successful automatic lighting is to use very sensitive security sensors with low re-trigger delays as opposed to occupancy sensors. Then program your controller software to handle the triggers. This means finding a sensor that goes off repeatedly when you wiggle your finger at it. Of course, this also implies that you also need a HA controller that can handle lots of trigger events without slowing down. I use HCA with a W800RF32 for this and I've manually set the "de-bounce timeout" to 0 which forces all trigger events to be handled by my own programming. I also modified hawkeye sensors to repeatedly respond to contact closure events with zero delay. These are connected to Ademco/Honeywell sensors to form the nucleus of a hardware system that can send several triggers per second to the central controller when any given room is occupied.