I'm just seeing what the community does for controlling lights with an open floor plan. My house has a kitchen, dining, family room combo with the fun complexity of kitchen/dining having 8 foot ceilings, and a 20 foot family room with giant windows. Currently there are smart switches, Philips Hue bulbs, motion and lux sensors in the space. I've got Hubitat set up to control each room individually along with one large Zone that takes over if all three rooms are on. I'm generally happy with the setup, but the inner tinkerer in me is always looking for other ways of doing things.
Basically, how do you control your lights in a similar setup?
My house is similar. My kitchen has a couple of partial walls (e.g. beside the refrigerator), so I put motion sensors shielded by those two walls. This gives me motion lighting for that one area. Beyond that, we use a Pico remote and Siri to control the remaining lights.
Aqara FP2. Same layout as you (Actually somewhere in between what you have and Bruce has. Partial wall where the fridge is) but not as big. It works great to split the space into multiple zones that each interact on their own.
I don't have an open floor plan but you could do things like point the sensor in a direction that only covers the area you want for motion and/or adjust the sensitivity of the sensor.
A not so aesthetic option would be putting blinders on the sensor to block the area you don't want motion detected from.
Using Fibaro sensors, I have two in the kitchen and two in the family room. The sensors are in opposite corners of each area/room. They are oriented to pick up motion at the boundaries of the rooms (no walls). Works great. Caution on the Fibaro is they are difficult to get reoriented after you replace batteries. My report card? Wife has no complaints
Our current and previous house had large, open spaces. My approach for both:
Bosch ISW-ZDL1-WP11G motion sensor for wide coverage, pet immunity, and rock-solid reliability. This just triggers ambient lighting (kitchen peninsula, living room lamp, TV backlight, for instance). A power-monitoring outlet tracks whether the TV is on to ensure that we do not end up in a suddenly dark room while watching a movie.
Similar to @bravenel, I have a discrete sensor at one entrance to the kitchen which is shielded by the fridge and cabinets. It only senses someone entering from the hallway, the basement stairs, or approaching the middle of the kitchen from the dining/living rooms. It triggers the kitchen sink light.
Everything else is intermittent use and may be operated via voice commands (Alexa in our house). Dimmer levels are tweaked based on modes, which in turn are set by a mix of external illuminance and time. One lamp is manually operated (gasp).
We just added smart blinds, so I will have to consider how to best work that into the mix. For the most part, we are only using them for privacy at night.
Aside from the bedrooms and bathrooms, our current home is one giant space with a 12' cathedral ceiling running from one end to another. There are a few 8' walls creating some separation, but it's basically two large open spaces.
All of the lamps and downlights in almost every room come on at level 1 at sunset and stay there until we go to bed. Anything that happens to be already on remains at its current level. Everything is controllable by wall switches or Hue button controllers, but generally the only lights we adjust manually are the kitchen, bedroom and bathroom lights.
I've noticed a trend in supermarkets to keep the lights off in the freezer and refrigerated cases until motion detectors detect someone walking down the aisle. I don't want my house looking like that. I have motion sensors on our alarm system that I could leverage to control lights, but I don't want lights turning on and off as we move about. All of the lights are Hue bulbs and downlights, and running them at level 1 provides enough light for most purposes and uses a trivial amount of power.
Only thing I'm looking to change is using the lux sensor on our weather station to turn the lights on earlier than sunrise if it's really cloudy. I considered using an interior lux sensor, but I don't think it's going to have any advantage over the outdoor one already present in the weather station.
