Whats the best sensor to buy for Pet owners?

Keeping in mind the sensor will be used strictly for turning the lights on and off when we come into a room. It cant be picking up the pets every time the move. The first sensor will be used in the living room which is a high traffic area for pets throughout the day.

Depends on the details. How big are the pets, what “zone” are they in, and what species? Dogs, cats that climb, birds, rabbits, and monkeys all present different kinds of problems for motion sensor placement.

(Dogs usually stay low, cats go both high and low, monkeys usually stay high, birds usually stay high but create air movement through the room. And weight of the pets usually determines the amount of heat they generate, although birds typically run hotter than mammals. So the details matter. :sunglasses:)

A typical “pet immune” sensor has a sensitivity setting that lets it ignore a typical mammal under about 20 pounds. So it will ignore a small dog or cat. But a large dog will still set it off, and surprisingly, a medium size parrot often will as well.

You can often position a motion sensor “upside down” and high in the room and it will catch people walking through, but not a large dog which is down lower. This can work really well for home automation use cases like turning on the lights as adults walk into the room, but may not be what you want if you want to catch potential intruders (or family children in the lighting case). There are other positioning possibilities as well, but again it depends a lot on whether the pet can be expected to move through the room like a person or not.

JD makes good points, but for my purposes (just dogs and cats) the Fibaro sensor has worked well. It’s more expensive but very configurable. I have a fairly large dog, and it took me a little while to get it set to the point where it wouldn’t pick her up, but still picked up people correctly. But since I got it set, it has worked very well. I bought an Iris sensor and the cat definitely trips that. I need to replace it so that doesn’t happen.

As @rpittser points out, in addition to the inexpensive “pet immune” sensors, which typically just have two or three settings, some of the more expensive motion sensors like the Fibaro have a much wider range of sensitivity options. So again, combination of sensitivity setting and positioning may enable you to ignore pets. But the details still matter.

Someone, maybe @Mike_Maxwell ? Uses motion sensors embedded in the wall with a narrow tube over them to really limit the detection area. Set at just the right height these can be very useful for distinguishing adults from some pets, but again may not be able to tell the difference between a small child and a large dog.

Yup, that would be me…

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That’s interesting. What are you using for those tubes and how do you attach them?

Looking online, do these ever come up available on Amazon Prime?

I assume these are the correct ones?

That’s the one. Unfortunately, they seem to have raised the price. I got it for $59.99 with Amazon Prime. I also found it here for $59.99 + $1.15 shipping:

Sweet. Im sure it will show back up at your price and on prime eventually. Ill keep an eye out. Its not a rush to get it right this second. The little lutron remote I picked up this weekend works a treat. Just wish it could do two scenes. Thanks for the help.

The silver tube is just a metal spacer from the hardware store, with some shrink wrap to secure it around the PIR sensor.
The white tube is a piece of shrink wrap with the tube removed afterwards.
In both cases you need to take the detector apart in order to get the shrink wrap around the PIR sensor.

BUT cannot run locally with or without stock handler…

Would you mind sharing the details of your configuration and what size dog please? My task is to do the same with the Fibaro and a Labrador and your configs would be a great place to start and save some time.

I have 3 boxers. 1 large 2 medium

Ecolink Pet Immune Motion Detectors. The Dogs have never tripped them and they work great. 4 minute reset time but that’s wasn’t a big deal for me as most of my auto offs are set to +5 minutes.

I bought 4 for $100

Has anyone seen a presence sensor that could work on a room by room basis? Ideally, I’d love to just stick a sensor on the dog’s collar and then get an alert when he crosses into a certain room rather than try to find the perfect motion sensor configuration.

This is called “microlocation.” Everybody wants it. It exists now for some secure commercial facilities, but it typically requires at least three devices per room and becomes very expensive.

One of the issues is that most low cost home automation motion detector technology is based on passive infrared, which has the advantage that it doesn’t go through walls. So you can define a “room” the same way most humans perceive it. But those don’t individually identify what caused the motion, just that heat was detected.

Most of the other technologies that individually ID a presence, however, do go through walls. That’s why you end up needing three devices, so that you can define the room appropriately.

So there’s nothing practical off the shelf right now, but you can see more discussion of different approaches in the following thread (this is a clickable link):

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I really like the Iris motion sensor for how quick it responds, but obviously its not pet immune. Is there anything out there as quick in response time? Does anyone have a comparison between the Iris and the Ecolink Z-wave Plus Motion Detector? Most of the comments in the forums talk about the original Ecolink Z-Wave sensor. Does anyone know if the Ecolink has a led as my second requirement is something for a bedroom so would need something without any lights.