Changing light dim based on mode or time of day

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I've got a lot of places in my home where I use motion detectors (or zone motion detectors) to turn on and off lights as people move through the house. This is primarily in stairwells, the pantry, places that aren't in constant use.

So far I've been using simple automations, but I end up with 3 simple automations for each area; 1 SA turns on the light at 100% during sunrise to sunset; 1 SA turns on the lights at 25% during sunset to sunrise and 1 SA turns off the light when the zone goes inactive.

This seems inelegant and creates a /lot/ of automations.

I've tried to figure out how to use modes to accomplish this. I have day and night mode being set automatically and I've fired off actions but it appears that you can't preset the brightness without turning the light on.

Is there a more efficient way to accomplish this? Is there a way to use mode to control the max brightness of a light?

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You could use Rule Machine to do this:

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Either Motion Lighting or the new Room Lighting should be able to do what you want, however for the most part I don't think they can prestage levels. Prestaging really isn't necessary in my experience, the lights just turn on to the proper level once motion activates them.

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I took some time today and figured out how to
Accomplish it with if then else in the rules machine. Being able to replace 2 basic rules (both of which had to execute each time) with a single rules machine entry has seemed to speed things up. After I was done doing that on all of my motion zones I had eliminated 16 basic rules and added 8 rules machine rules.

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