Since I got my system I have gone a little crazy and installed lots of switches, dimmers and now motorized Somfy Z wave enabled blinds, I have programmed the blinds to automatically open/close themselves based on the sunrise, but one some cloudy/rainy days I don’t see the point on closing them. My blinds are battery operated so if we have even 50 cloudy days per year which in MN it’s probably more like 100 that would represent a battery savings of around 30%. Not a deal breaker but it would be great to incorporate the weather or ideally a combination of weather/sunrise/sunset into the automation options.
Does anyone know how to achieve this? or if it’s even possible?
It’s easy to do, you just have to define “weather” in a way that is actionable.
A lot of people use a lux sensor and only close the blinds during the daytime if the light level is above a certain number. You can do that with the official smart lighting feature.
But then you do need a device capable of measuring the light level.
If you don’t want to add another device, the IFTTT service has a free
Weather channel who’s triggers include a change to “cloudy.” In that case, the simplest way to handle things would be to have that trigger change the mode, but you might end up setting up a lot of different modes in that case.
Core is a community created rules engine which is very powerful, and which I suspect could take either the IFT TT notification or the Lux sensor and give you a “while” condition. You should ask in the peer advice thread for that. ( Core calls and individual rule a “piston.”)
There are other ways to do it as well, so again, it just comes down to the first question of how are you defining “weather.”
If you have a nest (and nest manager SmartApp), the weather device in Nest Manager has estimatedLux calculations, that you can use with CoRE to create the automation you describe.
Right now I am using the Smartthings weather tile lux value and smartapps CoRE to control my blinds. Lux > 6000 between 9am - 9pm then close blinds. Tried smart lighting smartapps lux but it’s still beta and probably only 40% success rate also no local processing when using lux so I replaced it with CoRE.
I don’t have a nest, I have the WIFI HoneyWell Thermostat, but unfortunately it’s not Z wave enabled… : ( I got it right before I went on my Z Wave Craze… so can’t return it now.
Yes… The RTS Module… It was a pain to program the Blinds into Groups and then create the Virtual Nodes to assign to each group, but I Love it now! I have left facing blinds closing first +2 Hrs after sunset, then the forward facing windows at +3 after sunset and finally the right facing windows at +4. I wish the documentation for the Somfy products was better but once they are programmed I really like the system!
There is also a community dark weather 2.0 tile. You could try that. Just curious. What’s the problem with twilight and dusk? Is it not updating often enough?
I tried several of these, but none of them worked great. The weather app was the closest, but only worked every so many minutes. Ended up using a fibaro motion sensor that has a lux value. Works perfect and is extremely reliable. Let me know if you have questions.
Personally I have a CORE routine set up that checks the current Solar production values, if close to peak production (6.5kw) then I know its extremely sunny out. Others with Solar Panels could benefit from a similar situation to ‘read’ the level of the sunlight outside. Cheers
