Question

Apologies for the long post. Something I have never bothered to tackle is creating automations for the first floor lights in our house when someone wakes up in the middle of the night. However my wife is pregnant with our second now and has been having trouble sleeping and frequently makes her way downstairs in the middle of the night. All of the logic for our lighting is done in the smart lighting app and is based on a combination of the ST mode and motion. Currently none of those contain a dimmer setting so the lights just restore to their previous state (this is important to keep in mind). There are 2 ways I am considering doing this: 1. Adding more automations to the smart lighting app and editing my existing automations to add dimmer settings to them. The downside here is that I lose the current setup of restoring lights to the previous dimmer setting (which I'm debating how much I need) 2. Creating webcore pistons to turn on lights during this time period/ST mode based on the same logic but then restoring the lights to the previous dimmer setting before turning off after motion. The downside here is that it's dependent on webcore, it's not local, and it would take more time to create (I'm not a webcore guru) I'm wondering if maybe there's another option I'm overlooking, otherwise I think I may go with #1. Thoughts?  

Answer 1

Maybe some separate wifi bulbs like lifx to control independently?  

Answer 2

We use option 1, but based on a door sensor on our master bedroom door. Door opens and mode is night, lights turn on downstairs at 15%. Then when the door closes, lights go off. Then lights on motion when past sunset and home is home at 100% if the TV if off.  

Answer 3

1 would be easiest. If it is based on a mode, would there be a need for the previous dimmer setting? I. e. if the mode is sleep, would you always want dimmer set low. and then awake, always set full? If so that seems like just add the dimmer setting to the sleep/night mode and nothing further would need to be done. (Possibly alter awake to specify 100% if not already in the automation).  

Answer 4

Some general advice, from someone who has two kids (and started the automation before our first kid): keep whatever you do simple. I find the FAF (Family Acceptance Factor) to be low when the automations are complicated and unreliable. I tend to go with some basics: - upstairs lights go on at 10% when at night (night mode). - downstairs lights (motion sensor) come on at 100% any time of the day. The "big light" in the living room is controlled by smart switch and is usually manually triggered. I do have modes: Early morning (for when we go to work early) Home (day) Evening (after sunset, before bed) Night. Lights do different things (usually based on motion) depending on the time/mode. But I got rid of most of the dependencies (if something else on) as that made things too complicated. Too hard to account for all eventualities).