This may have been asked before, so apologies if it has.
I’ve got my daily routines working perfectly now. But with the days getting longer some of them are becoming redundant. Is there an easy way of setting up routines to work in the different seasons/months?
example
I wake up in the morning and my lamp slowly comes on, when i walk out of the bedroom, my morning routine kicks in. This turns on the bathroom lights, the stairs, kitchen and living room. In winter all these rooms are dark and i go in each one before work. But now, it’s light enough that i don’t need the majority of them on.
example 2
when i arrive home from work my lights automatically turn on and my nest kicks in. Again, great in Winter, but now it’s light enough that i only need them to turn on a few hours later.
I don’t want to remove them from the routine, is there any way of somehow setting up summer routines or having these ones only work during the winter months?
Would it be a case of setting up a new mode and throwing them all in that until winter time? Then placing them back in the existing mode?
Then creating a new summer mode, where lights automatically come on at say 6pm if it recognises i’m home?
I base those types of routines off of sunrise/sunset. I know a lot of people here say they have scheduler issues with sunrise/sunset, but for me they have worked pretty much flawlessly. This way the lights don’t come on if it’s not dark-ish.
The sunrise/sunset ones have been handy for me, when scheduling worked. It hasn’t for about a month, but last night and this morning worked perfectly for the first time in a while.
Recently, I picked up the Fibaro motion sensor with the luminance feature… I’ve been having some success utilizing that for lighting
I do use luminance on the Fibaro for internal hallway lights and I’m really happy with that as well. The sunset/sunrise +/- offset has worked consistently for me.
In addition to using Sunrise/Sunset timing when that’s the appropriate answer, I also have a couple seasonal requirements that I address with a Simulated switch to control it.
I have an outdoor Z-Wave outlet on my deck that seasonally controls my Christmas lights during that season and a water fountain during the warmer months. These two different items (obviously) run on drastically different schedules. So, I set up two simulated switches and use them as a conditional flag within my rules. When it’s Christmas season, I turn that simulated switch on and the same for the Fountain switch (flag) and they run the appropriate schedule.
The other flag/switch that I use is for Halloween. It’s called the Halloween - Not Home switch. If I’m not home on Halloween, I test for that flag and if it’s set, my lights are all turned off so the kids don’t wonder why my lights are on but I’m not answering the door.
None of the above is unique, but I thought I’d pass it along anyway.
