I want to place a motion sensor in my bedroom and turn on the light when there is motion so that I don’t have to turn it on from the wall switch.
But there’s of course movement when I sleep.
How can I prevent the motion sensor to trigger when I am moving in my sleep ?
I am using a Smartthings motion sensor and I have following apps:
I only automate my lighting in the bedroom in Home mode, however sometimes i start work extremely early so go to bed before everyone else in the house. so don’t want to put the house into night mode, in this case i have a condition for my lighting that if the pressure mat under my mattress is active the light is not automated, therefore my wife when she walks in to go to bed later does not trigger the lighting. this sounds like what you want, but it requires two sensors one to detect if there is motion in the room and the other to detect if the bed is occupied, so that would mean that the light would only turn on when your out of bed.
i positioned my sensor so that it will only turn on the light when I enter the room. Movement within the room does not trip the sensor. So when it’s dark outside and I walk into the room, the lights turn on. Lights turns off on a goodnight routine which didn’t fire last night :(. I typically tell alexa to turn off the lights before bed but I past out last night and slept with the lights on thanks to ST.
Very good question, and one that has often been discussed in the forums. See the following threads for many ideas. (Each thread title is a clickable link.)
thanks. they are all nice, different approaches to the problem.
But I am not looking for anything else to buy.
What I was looking for is more like using the sensor and apps, creating best condition to trigger movement events.
For example triggering according to the amount of movement ( or duration of movement)
Isn’t this possible ?
I use a phone/tablet/minimote to manually disable/enable the virtual switch. So nothing extra really needed. It’s been working pretty well. Bedroom Light Motion Disable is the virtual switch in this case. If any lights are already on, motion will not set off anything. Motion works until 10pm, after that manually turn things on/off, obviously you can extend this. I have a tablet next to my bed as well as a minimote one either side of the bed so it’s easy to toggle.
The easiest way is just to change the mode when you’re actually ready to go to sleep.
For example, at my house there is a motion sensor in the bedroom.
During the day, the sensor is completely ignored.
At sunset, the mode of the House changes to “night.” At that point, the motion sensor will trigger the overhead ceiling light.
When I’m ready to go to sleep, whether that’s seven in the evening or three in the morning, I change the mode on the House to “asleep.” Once the mode is asleep, the same motion sensor no longer turns on the overhead light. Instead it just turns on a soft nightlight on the wall. But I could’ve also set it to not turn on anything.
I have a very irregular sleep schedule, so this works well for me. Other people might do something similar just with a time schedule.
So there are a lot of different approaches, and they don’t all necessarily require another device.
bamarayne
(Jason "The Enabler" as deemed so by @Smart)
12
I am using the Enerwave ceiling mounted motion sensor. They have a 360° sensor and they are very adjustable.
I think I remembering someone noted an option I thought about implementing but haven’t yet. They have LED strip lighting under the bed. When the house is in Night mode, that is the only lighting that comes on at a low level.
I also thought about placing my motion sensors on the floor under the bed facing out. That way, when my feet hit the floor that would detect the motion but movement while sleeping would not.
I think my biggest issue with automating bedroom lights is that these lights are “the most personal,” as in they don’t necessarily have perfectly regular usage patterns and if they turn on at the wrong time you can tick off your significant other!
And, as soon as you automate a light, the manual local control (the pull string) becomes unusable. I think I have a solve for us on this one…Flic switches. I have 5 of them and I really haven’t use them yet as I’m still trying to figure out what I want to apply them to.
But, if we eliminate the pull cord on the lights on the nightstands, then I need to use the Flics to control them when I need them on outside of an automation of some sort.
So, lights under the bed for late night bathroom runs, motion sensors down low to only pick up feet (and maybe a regular sensor in the room otherwise) and Flics to control the lights that I can no longer “touch” manually anymore.
Of course, all paper at the moment since I haven’t implemented it yet.
I have all of that working right now in my bedroom. It works out well. I have a motion sensor under our bed that turns on an LED strip under the dresser and the master bath shower light. I also have one by my bedroom door as I exit. It turns on one upstairs hallway light at 10 percent and two lights downstairs. Once the motion sensors haven’t seen motion for five minutes the lights shut off. Same for my daughter. Her bathroom light turns on very low if she steps out of bed. The ST motion sensors work perfect for this. They are small and sensitive.
I believe I mentioned that somewhere. I have my motion sensor underneath the bed along with the lightstrip. Another nice thing is using the Gentle Wakeup app that gradually brightens the light strip underneath the bed. It works fantastic that way.
I put a door sensor on my bedroom door and created a mode called “One asleep” When this mode is on the house stays “awake” but the main light in the bedroom no longer triggers.
We have hues under the bed to light up the room blue as a night light so it tells my system to switch between the main light and the hues.