Well my Weatherflow Tempest was my lux sensor determining if it is dark outside for some background lighting applications. Just 2 weeks short of having the kickstarter version for 5 years I ended up with the dreaded "sensor failed" notice on Tuesday.
I have a replacement on order but would also like to look into a stand along lux sensor that is battery based that could be used outdoors. I know a lot of indoor motion sensors have lux but seems to be slim picking on outdoor options.
I think the Philips Hue outdoor sensor also measures lux.
I can't say for sure about either since I don't have them.
You might just want to go with a weather station, and get all the other fun stuff like temp, humidity, rain rate, wind speed and direction, as well as illumination. There are local integrations for weather stations in the community.
My Ecowitt station is on a pole out in my yard, it has a good Lux sensor if you are looking for actual values that do not get "washed out" when pointed directly at the sky, but since you are actually sensing darkness, I guess that would not matter much.
Ecowitt has great range using RF to its own tiny gateway, that connects to your local wifi, and it takes one AA battery that lasts over a year for the base station that does the Lux sensing.
My Hue gave up, leaked horribly and filled with water.
I just bought and installed the new Zooz outdoor sensor.
So far so good.
It's nice to set the Lux level for the motion events.
I have it set to 100 so I only receive events at my piston when appropriate; evening lights.
I was hoping to find something I could get overnight from Amazon until the new station arrives. I did some alternate time of day rule machine rule for the dark outside flags I used before I got my station 5 years ago but that only accounts for sunrise / sunset to set the flags. The lux sensor gave me some great granularity to gradually bring up or bring down my accent lighting.
I have a few Hue outdoor motion sensors that provide illuminance and survive the Canadian winter without issue. Some people have had success putting cheaper indoor sensors in a ziploc bag.
I have 2 and yes, they do measure lux
The Ziplock bag comes to the rescue so many times. The bad thing about indoor rated sensors that do lux they tend to max out a 800 lux while outdoor 10,000 plus.
FYI the WeatherFlow Tempest is a weather station
Get a Hue outdoor motion. Home Depot carries them in their stores. Mine is mounted under an eve and AA batteries last forever. I use it along with my Tempest.
The batteries were a PITA to change in the first generation sensors, so I switched mine to work with a 3VDC adapter.
With that said, the sensors are well built and last forever - mine are going on ~6 years.
Ah, that was not made clear in the original post and I had not heard of that type of weather station. Good to know. I see some posts about connecting them to Hubitat, but couldn't see if anyone got them locally connected with UDP, or if the cloud API is the only viable option.
You can't do UDP with Hubitat but Hubitat supports MQTT so I use WeeWx to collect the UDP broadcasts and publish the records via MQTT.
Tempest -> UDP broadcasts -> WeeWx UDP Integration -> MQTT Topic
MQTT Topic <- Ron's MQTT app <- Hubitat
The same for me with the Hue sensors, combined lux, temperature and motion. Work well since years and have very long battery life
I have stayed away from Hue because you had to use their hub. Is that still true with the Hue sensor?
Never mind it does require the hue bridge:
No, Hue sensors are all ZB3.0 these days (excepting perhaps their original-gen versions, but those have been off the market for many years), so they can pair direct to Hubitat.
Thier early-gen bulbs were ZLL (so required Hue bridge), but these days, all of their stuff is ZB3.0 -- it can all pair direct.
Download the Hubitat app
