Fake location for lighting

🛎️ Get Help
1

Hi All,

I've got some plant lights for my carnivorous plants that are all sub-tropical, or tropical. I'm in the pacific northwest.

I'm wondering if anyone has an app that allows for faking a location of say, Hawaii, and that drives the light timer. I don't want to just force to like 12h of light year round. Honestly, ideally, I'd say, 18h daylight in the summer, and then set a lower limit of 12 hours in the winter (as opposed to our normal amount this time of year, which is currently just under 10h.

Anyone got something like that, or an idea how I could approximate?

Thanks!

2

Do you use Node-RED? Because this is really easy to do in NR.

You’ll probably need a custom app to do this directly on Hubitat.

3

I don’t currently have NR set up.

Do you have an example of how this would be easy (with NR)?

4

No, but it is easy to make one. One example would be using the sun event node:

This node lets you configure the lat/long of any desired location and then sends out sun events as the payload.

5

Could you use one of the weather apps with a tropical location. Then pull the sunrise/sunset times from that?

6

This post isn’t about programming, its more about the times you need to set for your plants.
You got me curious about a few things, so I looked them up and had several surprises. So I figured you might be interested.
Google maps shows Honolulu is at latitude of 21.32.(degrees north of the equator) I looked up the sunrise and set times for Honolulu on this site...
https://www.timeanddate.com/sun/usa/honolulu

Today the day length there was 10 hrs 55 minutes. The shortest day there is in late December, its 10 hrs 50 min.
The longest day there is in June, its 13 hrs 26 min.
Not what I expected.

Apparently, moving closer to the equator gets a warmer climate, but not longer days. There is less difference between the longest and shortest day. Right on the equator the days would aways be 12 hours long.

So if your plants are tropical plants, you really could just use 12 hrs all the time.

I figured those carnivorous plants must all come from deep in the Amazon rainforest. I imagine huge man-eating venus flytraps there. Looked up “Where do Venus Flytraps grow?” It said they are native to boggy areas of North and South Carolina. What?? A spot in the middle between those states is at 34.66 latitude.

So I tried pitcher plant, another carnivorous one. There are many species of them, all over the world, but in the US they grow in Alabama, Georgia and South Carolina. Some types grow along the east coast and extend into the upper midwest and Canada.

Another carnivorous plant, butterwort, is listed as a common wildflower in Minnesota!

So apparently many carnivorous plants aren’t tropical plants. So you can look up the native home location of whatever plants you have, and use the latitude of where they grow, and your own longitude, to get your lights set up for your plants. But if you do have tropical ones, then just using 12 hrs all the time would be just what they are used to.

2 Likes
7

Thanks @geroose.

Definitely aware of where carnivorous plants are from. Butterworts and sundews are present on every continent save Antarctica.

I definitely could just do 12/12 (day/night). Heck, I could do 16/8 year round and assuming the individual plant doesn't want any kind of dormancy, they'd be fine. There are actually some growers that occasionally grow certain plants on a 24/0 schedule (for at least some amount of time). I was hoping, though, to do something with SOME variation based on seasons.

Just odd this isn't something I've seen in any of the automation tools. None of the wifi smart plugs seem to support setting a custom location, and neither does HE, etc.

Going to take a look at the weather app option.

8

You could consider cloning the rule, make several of them but just change the on / off duration of each respective one. Pause them all except the one you want and say once a month just go update the one with the schedule you want to be active and pause the other.
Does have some manual setup but cloning rules is easy.....maybe name them for the specific month? Then a little monthly interaction to manage. And hey. Who doesn’t like a reason to open an app and toy around a little.
Cheers.

9

Someone smarter than me would have to help you but there are APIs to get sunrise/sunset times based on the latitude and longitude you specify like Sunset and sunrise times API - Sunrise-Sunset.org. I know how to send HTTP Requests in RM but have no idea how to do anything with the response.

10

It does seem like there should be something available already for something like that. I have a cheap digital timer that has sunrise and sunset times available in it, but it’s not very accurate.

I know growers have been growing plants from lights for decades before there were pc’s or digital anything. I also see plants in Nurseries and plant stores that are blooming several months away from their normal bloom time. So growers have some way to control lights and time-shift the growing season. Maybe they now have it all under control of an app or program, but at one point they must have just manually adjusted the timers several times a year.

The problem with using a Node Red program with an alternate location, or a weather forecast for a specific city, is that you will get real sunrise and sunset times. And that means if you choose somewhere in southern Alaska to get a long summer day around 18 hrs, you will get an equally short winter day, around 6 hrs. The average of a location’s longest and shortest days is always somewhere around 12 hrs. And all locations will be at 12 hrs daylight on the spring and fall equinox. That might not be what you want. You had mentioned 18 hrs for summer and 12 for winter. That won’t happen anywhere.

If you want times like that, you would need a custom program. If you just need a summer schedule and then suddenly switch to a winter schedule, it would be easier to just change the times yourself. Or have two rules and pause one or the other. But if you want to gradually change from the custom long summer daylength to the custom somewhat shorter winter daylength, then you would need some rule or app to do it in steps. You would have to write or have someone write an app for that, or write something using Node Red. I am pretty sure it could also be done with Rule machine, since they have time variables that can be used as triggers. Rule machine currently doesn’t do anything with dates, so the time variables could be updated by a rule that runs once a day and adjusts the variables based on the Julian Date, which is just a day number that would need to be incremented by one each day.

11

If you are trying to replicate the sunrise/sunset times at or near the equator where these plants live natively, then you would want to force 12 hour days and nights. The equator doesn't have the large swings on length of day thruout year that you have in the Northwest. There are definitely not 18 hour days near the equator.

12

Right, I get that. Suppose this was more a "does something like this exist" question.

Thanks!

13

I have thought of another way of looking at it, and have come up with a much simpler solution.

As I mentioned, you won’t be able to find a real location with 18 hrs for summer and 12 for winter. But there is another way to use alternate locations.

Subtract your desired winter hrs from you summer hours. For the 18/12 summer/winter sample, you get 6.

Find a location that has that number of hours difference between the summer/winter times.

A location with 6 hrs will have around 15/9 summer/winter hours. (The times are always somewhat centered around 12 hours.)

Use the Node Red program or a weather forecast app to get times for that location.

Then use delays or offsets to get the times you want. To get 18/12 from a 15/9 location you would need to add 3 hours all year.

In your case, to get an 18/12 combination, you don’t even need a fake location.

According to that timeanddate site I mentioned before, Springfield Oregon’s longest day is 15 hrs 30 minutes, the shortest day is 8 hrs 53 minutes.

Add 3 hours to both of those and you get 18:30 for max summer daylength and 11:53 for minimum winter daylength. Very close to what you were looking for. And this will give a natural gradual change from winter to summer.

Here is a Rule Machine rule to do that:

Trigger:

When time is Sunrise - 180 minutes

Actions:

On: plantlights

Wait for events: When time is Sunset + 180 minutes

Off: plantlights

That’s all you need, using your own location.

1 Like
14

This is a great idea, except your math is slightly off. it's +90 to each, not +180. =)

15

Yep, you're right. 90 minutes extra at the beginning and end is what you need to get an extra 3 hrs.

1 Like