I’m looking for something that will report lux levels.
What are your recommendations?
Hey Mike,
I use the Zooz 4in1 and am happy with it. I use it to turn on/off lights throughout the day and have had no issues in over a year with it
Rick
It's a bit pricey but I highly recommend the Hue Outdoor Motion Sensor for Lux Reading I also have 4 of the Zooz 4-1's, The problem with the zooz 4-1 are they convert lux readings to a sliding scale type something like 0-15. My Hue right now is reading 31,362 Lux. Alot easier to automate from.
Also, the hue indoor motion sensor reports Lux and has been reliable for me so far. I've had it for about 1 year with the same battery.
Here's an example of 2 light sensors, over a 24 hour period.
-
Officeis a Dome motion sensor, at the back of the house (west end) -
Bedroomis a Zooz 4in1 sensor, mostly at the at the back of the house, but with a central sky light. So west end. -
Dinning roomis a Dome on the east end. So it gets full morning light.
It would be worth putting the sensor "together" and see how they perform side by side, because I don't really understand the graphs. The absolute max lux readings are totally different between Zooz and the Dome, yet the shape is pretty much the same.
The Zooz seems to go flat at 53 lux every day. It's so flat I wonder if it's hit a maxium reading? It also seems to have a really high "shelf" that trailed off until 8pm, which is well past sunset. You can see sunset in the office sensor and living room an hour earlier.
The spike later is turning on the lights so that makes sense.
Anyways, long story short I'm not sure I trust either of those two.
Honestly my aim is to have one in the house. I guess I could place the hue outside. I really just want the lux readings for automation of some motion lighting in the house.
Like @Ken_Fraleigh mentions Hue also has an Indoor with the same adjustable Lux readings settings and dedicated Driver it's actually I believe about $10 cheaper than the outdoor.
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I think I heard the hub is required to update the firmware and such ?
I don’t want to depend on their hub. Is there is anything I won’t gain by not having the hub? I assume I will still have complete control ?
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I have no idea on updating the firmware, I've never seen a reason for a need to update the firmware as these work great right out of the box, Yes you have complete control.
I also have the Hue Outdoor sensor as well and I’m super happy with it. Paired directly to the HE no updates.
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Yes, the Zooz maxes out at 53. The device physically reports values 0-100, so it's not really Lux. And for whatever reason, the Hubitat driver scales the device output to 0-53. My guess is that the driver was written for a previous hardware/firmware version. In any case, the values are good enough to write rules with.
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I have a Sensative Comfort Strip and it works well enough too.
Another alternative is to pull lux from a weather feed like DarkSky.
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Another plug for the Hue Outdoor sensors. I use them to determine outdoor lux for indoor lighting automations. If the lux outside is below Foo, (Foo = 1500) then my automations turn on the indoor lights in specific rooms.
This accounts for cloudy days, and separates me from something like apixu, or Dark Sky.
I've never been able to wrap my head around the use of Indoor Lux sensors, as it seems to me they would be somewhat rendered useless as trigger devices once a light came on...
S
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That's good to hear. Just ordered one for my back deck to compliment the Wyze Pan Cam I just added. Will be nice to have outdoor lux measurements to add to my station data.
DarkSky lux appears to reflect cloudy days pretty accurately.
I use the lux reading from my Weatherflow weather station. Works great, updates every minute.
I just installed.
What lux levels does it report and how often do you poll?
Mostly ok? It wasn't consistent enough for me, see the weird step from 25 to ~0 after the other two sensors were reporting dark/dusk. I'm not sure I'm too enamored with lux sensors unless they are dedicated to the task. I was using it to turn on lights, and of course they are near those lights so see the lights when they turn on. Sure you can fix that and ignore values when the lights are on...but it didn't seem worth it.
