These are the best ways to automate lighting in your smart home
A smart home is much more than a smart speaker that controls a few devices. You should aim to automate as many features as possible, and lighting is the best place to start.
You can combine all of the ideas below at once.
Use sunset and sunrise as triggers
Starting with the most basic automation of all, most smart home platforms make it easy to automate your lights not only based on the time of day, but also the position of the sun. This means that as sunrise and sunset change throughout the year, your automations will respond accordingly based on outdoor light levels.
Use the sunset and sunrise triggers to turn on lights that you would normally trigger manually at that time. I’ve found that waiting for the sun to set often means I’m sitting in a room that’s a little too dark, so I’ve tweaked my Home Assistant automation to add a delay to this time. I now have biased lighting in the living room that turns on 15 minutes before sunset.
Associate common lighting patterns with scenes
Scenes are perfect for controlling multiple lights at once, allowing you to design targeted setups based on what you’re doing. Very few lights in my house are individually controlled, with most associated with scenes that match what I’m doing. It took me a few weeks to come up with the right device names and behaviors, so be prepared to tweak and modify them as you go.
My biggest hurdle with Scenes was getting Siri to recognize my naming conventions. I linked “Food” and “Action” for my main evening scene, where the lights in the kitchen, living room and dining table are all on, so I can cook and serve dinner. In the end, I opted for “Focus”, because it caused no problems for Siri.
I also have a ‘Relax’ scene that triggers dim lighting at night in the living room (while turning off the dining table and kitchen lights), perfect for TV, movies and games. I also designed a “Cat Nap” scene that leaves a few specific lights on for our cats (while also simulating their occupancy) when we go out at night.
You can get as creative as you want here and even introduce colored lighting into the mix. That said, I only have four scenes at the moment, and that seems enough.
Ambient light sensors go even further
Jérôme Thomas / How-To Geek
Regardless of the active scene, you probably have a few lights here and there that you always want to turn on at a certain time of day. I have a lamp behind my TV, which adds a warm glow to the corner of the room when it turns on early in the evening.
But sunset isn’t always the ideal trigger for this. During those darker days, when the storms turn into day and night and the sun spends all day in bed, I find myself manually turning on this light. You can automate this process if you add an ambient light sensor to your smart home setup.
As the name suggests, these sensors detect light levels and offer a trigger you can use for automations. When the light level drops below a certain level, you can turn the lighting on and then turn it off again once the storm has passed. You can do this either using the light levels outside by affixing the sensor to your window, or simply using the light levels in the current room.
You’ll need to experiment with the readings a bit before you find the perfect balance. Home Assistant is particularly good at this, and some passive infrared sensors can even do double duty as ambient light sensors (albeit with a lower degree of accuracy than dedicated units).
Motion sensors and presence detectors add extra intelligence
Motion sensors take the form of passive infrared (PIR) devices that can be battery powered or hardwired. They’re perfect for any lighting that really only needs to turn on when motion is detected, like closet or pantry lighting. I have a motion sensor connected to a light in my laundry that only triggers the bulb in the ceiling after sunset.
Occupancy sensors are a little different in that they use mmWave sensors to detect presence in a way that doesn’t require a lot of movement. A light that relies on an infrared sensor will eventually turn off if you stay still enough, but mmWave is much more sensitive and can detect small movements like breathing.
You can use these sensors to add conditions to your automations, assuming you’re using a platform that supports them like Home Assistant. For example, you can have the lighting in your living room turn on automatically depending on the time, but only if your presence is detected.
To achieve this, consider creating an automation (call it “Living Room Presence”) that turns on the lights if you are in the room, then creating another automation to activate the “Living Room Presence” automation at certain times of the day, or based on sunset or sunrise, or ambient conditions.
Adapt the color temperature to the time of day
If you’ve opted for smart bulbs (and even if you don’t yet have enough in the house to make a difference), matching the time of day to the white temperature is a neat trick that some smart home platforms are capable of. Apple calls this Adaptive Lighting, and the functionality extends to Philips Hue, while Home Assistant is able to do it using an integration of the same name (available through the Home Assistant Community Store).
In addition to avoiding any mismatch between the different white temperatures in your home, this behavior can also help you wake up and fall asleep a little more efficiently.
Lighting automations are just one of the cool ways you can use a platform like Home Assistant to gently wake you up in the morning.
