Controlling lights question

[SBDOBRESCU (Bobby)]

@greencat

idea of automating but I don’t want to waste too much energy

One of the biggest advantages of HA is saving energy not wasting it. As for your use cases…here are some ideas:

@greencat

Wife comes home if 1 hour before sunset then all lights on except if husband home

You can accomplish this easily with routines and modes

@greencat

Lights in living room off after 30 minutes last motion in hallway motion sensor

This to me seems wasteful. I would buy another sensor for livingroom. But if you don’t want to go that route, then you can install @bravenel 's smart app “Tun off after some minutes”:

Turn off after some minutes

EDITED: ST has fixed the omission in Smart Lights, and this function is now there. When creating an automation to do this, select your light, turn off, and then scroll to the very bottom of the list of how to trigger it to Power Allowance Exceeded (which is a ridiculous name, but oh well). Smart Lights is missing the function that was available in Lights & Switches V1, to turn off some switches x minutes after they were turned on. I’m sure ST will fix this omission soon. In the meantime, this app will do that function:

@greencat

Select lights off after 11pm

Easily accomplished using a routine. If you also don’t want your lights activated by motion (I have a cat so I don’t want my lights to come on every time the cat walks by) then use a “night” mode where you restrict the motion activated lights to come on.

@greencat

System armed if between 11pm and 5am

Use the same routine/mode to activate your alarm for the “night” mode, and then at 5am put your home into a different mode that disables the alarm. Mine is called “Daytime”.