Motion Lighting

[didymus]

I thought it would be great to have hubitat turn my room lights off after a number of minutes of inactivity/no motion.

However, what about when I sit down to read, or watch TV, or even standing at the kitchen sink doing dishes? My motion detectors report no motion and soon after, depending on the delay I have set, my lights turn off.

How does one deal with this situation?
Is there a best practice?
Any creative ways of handling this?

[Cobra]

I handle this situation by using multiple motion sensors.

e.g for the kitchen,
I have a motion sensor near the door to turn on the lights as I walk into the room.
However, this would not really pick up slight motion in front of the hob, so I have an additional sensor near the cooker, then an additional sensor near the sink for when someone is standing there.

So, even the slightest movement re-triggers one of the sensors and keeps the motion 'active' to stop my timeout switching off the lights.
Working with a timeout of 5 mins, this has never switched off the lights when someone is in the room.

For my office, I added an additional motion sensor under my desk.
Just the occasional movement of my leg(s) keeps the motion active

I use one of my apps to tie the sensors together and control the timeouts etc but you could probably do it with Rule Machine if you didn't want to use a custom app.

Andy

[Brandon]

Also there is a built in app "Zone Motion Controllers" that can be used.

[marktheknife]

@Cobra

I have a motion sensor near the door to turn on the lights as I walk into the room.
However, this would not really pick up slight motion in front of the hob, so I have an additional sensor near the cooker, then an additional sensor near the sink for when someone is standing there.

This is what I do as well. The built-in motion lighting app allows the user to pick one (or more) motion sensors that trigger the lights to turn on, but also has the option to select another motion sensor(s) to keep the lights on.

@didymus

what about when I sit down to read, or watch TV

For situations when you’re really not moving much, you can consider adding a pressure mat under your chair that’s wired to a z-wave contact sensor that accepts external inputs. Or you can plug your tv into a pocket socket with power monitoring; create a virtual switch and a rule that turns the switch on when the power monitoring is above x watts (whatever your tv draws when on), and turns off when below that threshold.

If your TV or AV receiver are network-connected and have a hubitat driver, you can use that device’s switch status directly (i.e. no need to add the intermediate step of pocket socket and virtual switch).

Motion lighting allows you to disable turning lights off based on a contact sensor or switch status.

Not all of us are as good as Andy at writing apps, but luckily there’s a good option for this with the built-in apps, plus he shares many of his apps freely anyway .