UPB tricks

[hucker]

It is interesting how the lighting has morphed over the last 4 months. My 4yo and 7yo daughters are the power users of UPB and the wife likes it simple.

In my kids rooms I have the US130's that have single and double tap settings for the top and bottom rocker. They are setup as follows:

2 top tap 100% snap
1 top tap 80% snap
1 bottom tap 0% snap
2 bottom tap 10% 1.8sec_fade

The double bottom tap to 10% is used as a night light for when they go to sleep (the HVPro turns it off at 11PM). I see the kids use all 4 of these options and they don't seem to care about the delay on my older switches.

Are there any other tricks like this that you find useful?

 

[webmtn]

That's very inventive. Some other tricks I have heard of users doing are using the long fade rates of the switches for various purposes. For example, I know of one user that has a switch on a hour fade rate (or 30 minutes) in his young child's room on a good night link. He tells the switch to turn off, but it has a fade rate of 1 hour, so the child goes to bed with the room fairly bright, but it dims down so gradually that the child doesn't even realize it and after 30 minutes or so, the light has dimmed down enough that it is obvious that it is getting darker but the child is already asleep. Another user told me he did the same thing with a lamp, but didn't dim it all the way off, but stopped it at a low level, so that in effect, he created a night light.

I've heard of a bachelor who said that he was going to do the same thing for when he had "company". Because the fade rate was so gradual, and he didn't get up to adjust the light level, the company wouldn't even realize that it was getting darker. Don't know if he ever did or not............

I know of one user that set his lights in his master bathroom so that when they got up early in the morning, his lights would come on very gradually, so as not to "shock" his eyes.

Others have used the fade rate to lengthen the bulb life of outside lights. During the winter, bulbs can get very cold, and applying a sudden shock to the bulbs can cause the filaments to break. Putting the switch on a 30 second or 1 minute fade up gradually applies the voltage to the filament so that you don't have the shock. I actually did this at my house. It seems like I had been changing outside bulbs all the time - once I did this, I rarely change bulbs now.

Easy and fun stuff to do with your UPB devices and get great payback..........

 

[MikeB]

This isn't UPB specific, but my 8 year old sold loves the bedside keypad controls I setup for him. I color coded the buttons to make them a bit more exciting, and have it configured to control his main room lights as well as a couple lamps in his room.

Here's a pic:

http://www.techav.com/pics/colorkplday.jpg
http://www.techav.com/pics/colorkplnight.jpg

Another thought I had was to replace all the buttons with 8 colored/numbered keys. He would have to remember a certain combination of colors/#s to turn on a specific lamp (like, 1+3+4 turns on his main lamp, 2+5+7 turns on lamp 2, and 1+2+6 turns on lamp 3 or something similar). He loves memory type games, so I think he'd love it - but I haven't set it up for him yet.

 

[drozwood90]

This isn't UPB specific, but my 8 year old sold loves the bedside keypad controls I setup for him. I color coded the buttons to make them a bit more exciting, and have it configured to control his main room lights as well as a couple lamps in his room.

Here's a pic:

http://www.techav.com/pics/colorkplday.jpg
http://www.techav.com/pics/colorkplnight.jpg

Another thought I had was to replace all the buttons with 8 colored/numbered keys. He would have to remember a certain combination of colors/#s to turn on a specific lamp (like, 1+3+4 turns on his main lamp, 2+5+7 turns on lamp 2, and 1+2+6 turns on lamp 3 or something similar). He loves memory type games, so I think he'd love it - but I haven't set it up for him yet.

What kind of switch is that?

--Dan

 

[MikeB]

This isn't UPB specific, but my 8 year old sold loves the bedside keypad controls I setup for him. I color coded the buttons to make them a bit more exciting, and have it configured to control his main room lights as well as a couple lamps in his room.

Here's a pic:

http://www.techav.com/pics/colorkplday.jpg
http://www.techav.com/pics/colorkplnight.jpg

Another thought I had was to replace all the buttons with 8 colored/numbered keys. He would have to remember a certain combination of colors/#s to turn on a specific lamp (like, 1+3+4 turns on his main lamp, 2+5+7 turns on lamp 2, and 1+2+6 turns on lamp 3 or something similar). He loves memory type games, so I think he'd love it - but I haven't set it up for him yet.

What kind of switch is that?

--Dan

That's an Insteon KeypadLinc with colored filters.