Outdoor lights
Automate them with smart switches and virtual sensors
Thanks to a twilight sensor, you can always have light in the dark and keep yourself and your loved ones safe. As soon as the measured brightness falls below the set value, the light switches on automatically. And off again, when brightness goes above the set value instead. This is something that’s been around for quite some time and in the “wired world” requires a lot of wiring! Now you can have this, and more, with much less! Let’s see how.
The problem
Some years ago when renovating the entrance of our home we built a beautiful stone wall and put some lights on the floor to light it up from the bottom. The view in the evening is amazing, there’s only one problem: someone needs to switch on the lights at some point. So most of the times we left it switched off. But recently I found a solution…
The solution
Since starting this journey into home automation I had the entrance stone wall lighting in my todo list. I wanted to have it working alone. In the backyard entrance we already have a light driven by a twilight/motion sensor. Since I needed to bypass the physical switch, I had to wire the sensor back to the switch, doubling the work (when not directly integrated into the light).
For the main entrance I wanted something easier to set up (especially considering there were no conduits available for the wiring!).
This time though I had a new ally in Home Assistant (HA) and the Zigbee mesh network of smart devices connected to it. Initially I wanted to couple the physical switch of the outdoor light to a Sonoff ZBMINI Extreme that I already had available but unfortunately it didn’t fit into the jam packed small wall box. I then adjusted the plan and got a Vimar 2-way switch IoT connected mechanism that basically combines in a single module a physical and a smart switch. I chose Vimar because it is compatible with the in wall box as we use that brand for all the other switches we have in our home. I replaced the old dumb physical switch with the smart new one. Easy.
Then the fun part: creating the automations in HA to switch on the light at dusk and off at dawn (or at a fixed time in the night). Dusk sensor is virtual and provided by the sun integration that uses the location of the home (as configured in HA) to track if the sun is above or below the horizon and give access to multiple useful other sensors (next rising, next setting, next dawn, next dusk, etc…).
Now that the physical infrastructure was set up, all I had to do was create three automations:
first for switching on the light every day at dusk (uses next dusk time) toggling the state of the Vimar smart switch;
second for switching off the light and that is triggered by time at midnight;
third for switching on the light when coming back home late at night (if the light is off). This is triggered based on people count in the home’s zone (leverages device tracking through HA companion application).
Lesson learned: Vimar IoT devices can be configured to work with Bluetooth or Zigbee networks and one needs to do it upfront via the Vimar app. Spent a few minutes yelling to the device before reading the full instructions…always true “RTFM”!
I’d love to read your questions and answer them in a future issue. Just hit reply and drop me an email or leave a comment.
Until next time!
Daniel