I posted this on FB and didn't get much help. I emailed support and they just told me to check out the community. I love HE but I appreciate wink phone support before they started to derail and never pushed me to finding answers elsewhere.
Here's my issue and I want to know how you guys are dealing with this, I've been search the forum and FB but haven't found my answer.
Motion sensor is set to turn on my kitchen lights between 4pm to 1am. and to go off after 10 mins of inactivity. Many times I'm in the kitchen and it will go off as it should, but if I then tell Alexa to turn on the kitchen lights, it will go off sometimes in less than 5 mins.
What do you guys do when you have a motion sensor to turn off something at X time and then manually turn it back in because you need some more time every now and then?
I don't know if this is the best method but I have my outside lights setup to come on with motion and turn off after 3 minutes of inactivity but on Halloween I wanted the lights to stay on as turning them off indicates to the kids your out of candy so I setup a virtual switch which I setup to prevent my motion lighting when that switch is on (it also keeps my front door from auto locking when closed). This worked great for Thanksgiving as well as we had a house full of people that evening.
@Terk, Thank you, I will try to read up again on Virtual switches, I tried that when when I 1st got HE but something about it I didn't understand, I don't think I was doing the setup right, but with the Virtual switch, can you have Alexa turn it on?
So when the motion goes off and If I need more time can I say Alexa turn on Motion switch?
@aaiyar Thank you for your input also, You're not referring to the Alexa skills are you? because I have that setup, if not do you mind giving me a little more details on how to setup what you mentioned please?
Give your motion lighting automation a name in the section titled, "Control with Alexa or Google Home using this name" that you can use (eg. Kitchen Lights). Then add it to the Alexa skill. Control the lights using this name.
P.S. Look at the section immediately above "Enable logging" in your motion lighting rule.
You could add the light and the virtual switch to an Alexa group and control it that way so the virtual switch would be turned on/off with the light and prevent the motion lighting from interfearing but I think @aaiyar is right and adding a name to the Control with Alexa or Google section will work best for your use case
@Terk I don't know how I missed that control at the bottom. I guess what's confusing me is I've always had that working via the Amazon Echo skill.
I'm trying to understand how is this different or will get me a better result vs the light switch already liked via Amazon Echo skill and I can control it already via Alexa
