I decided to have some consistency in the main living areas of the house and get Inovelli 4-in-1s for every daily use room. So now I'll have a fair number of extra motion sensors (mostly Dome(5), but also a Zooz and an Aeotec)
What should I do with them? any novel uses that others have thought of?
So far I've thought of
Sell them (boring, and hard during pandemic)
Add them to existing areas to create motion zones with either False motion reduction or Motion aggregation, also boring, and kind of defeats the purpose of having all the same sensor type
Adding them to less needed/auxiliary areas (cat litter box, bar, under the sink, utility closets, refrigerator?
I have exhaust fans in all three of my bathrooms. In two of them (master & guest), I have a motion sensor that will detect someone setting on the WC and turn the exhaust on. The exhaust goes off 1 min after the sensor turns inactive.
In the master and guest bathrooms, I also use motion sensors to detect when someone is in the shower (it turns on a hot water circulation pump).
I also have motion-driven lighting in both these bathrooms.
I have an Aeon MultiSensor 6 outside, under an eave. It's been working for a couple years now, on batteries. (I have a hole drilled to get power, but as luck would have it, the hole on the inside can't 'see' the outside hole. So I haven't completed that.. been 2 years, I'm on the 2nd set of batteries, so I have little motivation.)
You may have to reduce the field of view for some uses... use a piece of tape to narrow what the sensor sees. I have motions over the kitchen sink, showers, and middle of the stairs. They are used to augment existing motions. Shower motion equals longer On time for Bathroom light, for example.
I like the bathroom fan idea. I have a non-“connected” humidity controlled wall control, narrowing the field of the sensor to the toilet and swapping the wall control for a lutron fan switch could be good.
Hmm. Narrow field of view in an interesting idea... you could do a motion version of those directed audio cones they have in museums, e.g. “is a person standing in this 3ft radius?”
Made me think, I wonder if in a darkened room if it was in a bedside drawer if it could detect the drawer opening and turn the bedside light in low?
Knowing the aeotec survived outside is good! I already have a Netatmo weather station but I could put it on the opposite side of the house and blend the measurements for more accuracy
Only you would know whether you could benefit from combining motion sensors into a zone, as it depends a lot on the physical layout of your home and the types of automations that you use.
But I have several areas where I do just this and it can really improve the WAF. My wife doesn’t like it when motion-triggered lights turn on unnecessarily, or when they turn off while she is still in a room but not moving around much.
Boring? Perhaps, but for me WAF is a major consideration when planning my device deployment and automation programming.
What is the purpose of using all the same sensor type in your case?
or make a beam sensor. Did this yesterday for a spot my wife wants lights to turn on right when she steps "here" (3/8" heat shrink tubing fits iris sensor perfect!).
Haha, those look like cameras to the layman. I have some of those without the shrink tubes in bathrooms to automate lighting, and people freak out that they are cameras. These would really rattle them.
I have had an "abandoned" GoControl Z-Wave PIR alarm-type motion sensor hanging out in our unheated/detached garage for almost 5 years. Set it up with a Wink robot as a Q&D notification that someone was in the garage, but the sensor would false 2-3 times per day so I quickly gave up on it and disabled the Wink robot.
This afternoon, I re-paired it with our new HE and mounted it at knee height over our automatic doggy door, to see if it could count how many times Sir Barxalot goes outside to, um, survey his kingdom every day. Don't know if it is the Z-Wave mesh not being settled yet or if it is by design, but the sensor takes 3-6 minutes to report that motion stopped after the dog passes under it. Maybe this is by design, and this alarm-type-looking sensor is really only intended for rough occupancy detection?
In any case, it looks like I am going to have to find another use for this motion detector, and figure out how to incorporate a magnetic contact sensor inside the automatic sliding doggy door mechanism.....
I just trigger the ceiling lights. No one ever turns them off when leaving the bathroom, so I have these turn them on, then off after 5 mins of no activity.
I also have one in the back of my mailbox. I didn't weatherproof it at all, and it's been fine. But I had to get a plastic mailbox so the signal would reach the house.
I ordered a very small contact sensor from NYCE that I hope to be able to put on the back flap of our mail slot. From the photos it looks like it will fit.
Using all the same sensor? Mostly aesthetics, partly confidence that if they’re all the same they’re going to report data in a more consistent way, (and all use the same type battery!)
