I have a lighting setting in my corridor working like this: when I walk in, a motion sensor detects the movement and activates the light, after 7 minutes without movement the light turns off automatically. This works between sunset and sunrise (with some offset).
I would like to add another condition though: when the weather is not clear, the lights should turn on also during the day.
I successfully installed the Openweather and created the virtual device, set it up with the API code and all the coordinates, but I find no way to get it to work with the room lighting app.
Any suggestions?
Not to go down another rabbit hole, but setting up a dedicated lux sensor is another option... I recently did this over the winter, and I've moved most of our main-floor lighting (we just have a small house) to now be lux-based instead of time-based. It's been a real game-changer for us - I wish I'd done this years ago.
I use a Zooz ZSE11 (set to report only lux) pointed out our front window, but you could aggregate multiple sensors for more holistic coverage with a larger house / bigger footprint. Food for thought if the Openweather option doesn't reliably pan out.
I use my outside illuminance sensor to change scenes (Night->Dawn, Dawn->Morning, Day->Evening and Evening-> Late Evening)
Then within those scenes, I also have variables for levels, that are adjusted by an inside light sensor in each room that drives the overall brightness of the room to a target level.
If it gets darker in the afternoon due to weather, the lights in my Day scenes will come up a bit to maintain the set Lux level of the room as needed. It is very gradual and I do not even notice the lights changing.
If I want to brighten the whole room, I adjust the light target dimmer on the dashboard to brighten or dim the whole room at once. Every scene change sets an inside target level for that scene, by adjusting the virtual light target dimmer device to the target level.
One thing to consider is that this might not work in one Room Lighting instance. Most likely, you'll need to use two different instances for the same light or rethink your current one.
Is this part a limit or disable for activation? If so, this current Room Lighting instance will not work during the day since it would be outside of the times allowed. The easiest would be to create a second Room Lighting instance for the corridor and limit it to between sunrise and sunset (i.e. the opposite) and the use the OpenWeather conditions to help.
If you wanted only one Room Lighting instance, this is the way to go. Rather than limit by times, you limit based on ambient light. Cloudy days would bring down the lux allowing the motion sensor to work as normal. Night is always dark, so Room Lighting would work like normal.
Hi there and thank you for your patience, I was pretty busy at work during the last month and the last thing I wanted in the evening was fiddling with my HE
I think this is the solution I was looking for, I did not think out of the box to create a new rule. I have a question, though, I need to use several weather conditions to trigger the event (or not to) and it seems I can't select more than one condition. I don't know how to get out of this.
Thank you again!
Update: with Rule Machine, I can select all conditions I want when it comes to the weather but I can't select the two times in which the rule applies.
With Simple rule, I can select the two times but not all the weather conditions.
Someone should improve one or the other...
