With work from home, I spend a bunch of time in my den which has a bank of east-facing windows. Now that it is summer, it can get warm in the room when the sun is shining in the window. To make is a bit more complicated, there are trees shading the window, so the sun hits directly early in the morning, and about mid-day.
What I would like to do it to install automatic shades controlled by a luminance sensor. The sensor would be on the window sill looking outward. Therefore, it doesn’t need to do anything but see the sun. I’d control it with WebCore.
Has anyone created such a thing? What luminance sensor did you use? All the posts on here are pretty old. I am hoping there are new options.
Okay so. I don’t have smart shades, so I don’t really have ideas for that.
But what I ended up doing was adding a smart weather tile to my hub, and it proves luminance data, so I can turn on lights accordingly.
What’s driving me absolutely BONKERS is that I cannot for the LIFE of me backtrack what I did to tell you which smart tile I added. I could’ve sworn I had to tell it my local airport code, but maybe just my zipcode??
Here’s one that I found while trying to figure out what I had and how I got it:
Thanks, but general luminance will not help. I am looking specifically for the amount of light coming through a particular window. Right now it is very sunny, but not shining through the window, so the shades would be open. At 9am and 11:30am today, the sun was blasting through the window and I’d want the shades closed. I need a sensor for how much light is coming in that window.
I’m using an Aeotec Multisensor 6. One of its sensors is a light sensor. I’ve been using this without issue for a couple of years to control my lighting automations. I’ve been very happy with its reliability and accurate reaction to changing lux levels. One point of note is that I use it connected to a usb charging plug to avoid issues with batteries failing and to have it provide more frequent updates of light level (using @erocm1231’s DTH I am able to get it to provide lux readings every 1 minute as opposed to every 8 minutes offered by the standard DTH)
I had a similar glare issue and had posted a separate thread trying to see how to get the solar position, so I could use this to drive the blinds open/closed (adjusted for blocked view). Lacking this, I’ve got the HomeSeer MF sensor set up with occupancy and timing automation. The sensor seems to work well for what it does, but addressing a glare point that moves throughout the year is still not solved. For now, the automation will close the blinds only during the glare period (it gets much brighter later in the day, but its not glare). I manually open it at this point.
The Aeotec multisensor 6 should meet your needs (see post no. 4 above). Put this inside the window in the location where you want to measure light level.