I wanted to share with everyone all of the automation and rules I recently added to my bathroom, thinking others might benefit from the ideas, especially #8…
In my bathroom, I have a GE outdoor module hooked to a space heater, a Z-wave switch for the main lights, a Link bulb in the toilet room light fixture and a motion sensor above the main bathroom door.
I have these rules:
If motion is detected and the main light is off, turn on the Link bulb at 1%. This way, at night, when we go in, it will dimly light the room without blinding us.
If motion stops and the main light is off, wait five minutes and then turn off the link bulb.
If the main lights go on, turn on the link bulb at 100%.
If the main lights go off, turn off the link bulb.
If the link bulb turns off, but the main lights are on, turn the link bulb on. I needed this to prevent the link bulb form turning off if it came on from motion, then I turned on the main light, and then the motion stopped, but the main light stayed on.
If the motion detector reports a temp below 64, and the house is not in Away mode, turn on the heater. (there is a skylight in the bathroom and it gets cold in the winter.)
If the motion detector reports a temp above 66, turn off the heater.
This is my favorite rule: If the main lights turn off, and the garage door is open, turn the main lights on. This prevents us from going to sleep with the garage door open! (and prevents things like, close the door at 11:30 pm. (Sometimes, I WANT the door open at 11:30 pm.)) The last thing we do before going to bed is turn off the bathroom lights. So, we cannot go to bed with the door open ever again!
The “left it open” or whatever other app will also notify you, sometimes incessantly, if you leave a door open for more than a defined number of minutes.
I use this for the garage doors since the wife has the bad habit of just hitting the close button and taking off, and I find out when I check the garage camera hours later.
I think nagging is the best way, because I don’t want to auto-close them in case that I do indeed want them open
Are you on V1 or V2 hub? The reason why I ask, it seems like if (for some reason) the heater doesn’t get a response from the temperature sensor and it would already be on, it could get hot being on for hours…but then again perhaps the heater will auto-shutdown based on it’s own local fire prevention circuitry or a max temperature setting.
Well, the rule says greater than 66 degrees. Every time it ticks up another degree, it has a chance to trigger the rule, which would shut it down. And yes, the heater has a thermostat that will turn it off if it exceeds the set temp.
@Todd_Whitehead: I’m glad you have a backup plan for turning off the heater, since ST’s cloud platform issues have been frequent and greater than a few hours, making many of these critical devices unresponsive, or worse, detect motion when there isn’t any…
I might implement something like this when/if I can trust ST backend to fire off the rules with 99% confidence. For right now, ST is less than 85% on just locking my front door when the door contact sensor fires…
Prior to this, I would leave the heater basically plugged in and on most of the time and set the thermostat on the heater to control on and off. I would try to remember to turn it off if I left the house, but sometimes forgot, or I would forget to turn it on when I came home.
So, this improves on that somewhat by reducing the chance it will come on when no one is home.
Thanks for your response. Is there such a thing as a bad kit? I ask because I think I may have one. Is there a discussion forum where I can find more info? Thanks
One comes with a device you put in your garage that gets on wifi and sends open and close commands like the remote in you car and has a tilt sensor that you put on the door.
Mine replaces the wired keypad on the wall with one that talks wirelessly with a small box that is connected to Ethernet on my network.
I’m assuming you get issues with the Smartthings integration, but the myQ app reports correctly?
If that is the case, your problems are probably more related to how myQ integrates with ST and the fact that it is not fully supported. The unofficial smart app for myQ integration added support for a contact sensor or a tilt sensor to force a refresh of the status when the contact sensor or tilt sensor senses a change. That way, you are relying less on polling (which can be inefficient) and more on event driven updates.
It only works with non-ancient chamberlain or lift master (maybe craftsman) openers. Anecdotal reading of the boards seems to me (completely subjectively) that the one I have generally works better than the WiFi one.
