Hello!
First post on this forum, so please bear with me. I’ve been a long time HomeSeer user (please don’t hiss at me, I know I’m a laggard!), but have finally recently made the glorious jump to HA.
Background / Problem
I have been utilizing motion sensors in my home to trigger lighting automation, based on time of day and sometimes local lux levels. This works great in the day time when the DIM targets are very high, or simply 100%. One major problem I ran into with my recessed LED lights, is that when trying to fire them at night from 0% to extremely low DIM targets (~4 - 6%), the lights take considerable time to build charge and finally fire / illuminate (hard to build up those caps quickly when you’re clipping most of your wave form out). In HomeSeer, I was able to greatly improve this behavior by using their CAPI controller with a simple script, which called for a ~80 - 100% DIM target for ~300msec, then called the final ~4 - 6% “night light” DIM target. This resulted in a short burst of power being delivered to the LED light’s driver, then cutting power back to the desired level. This “jump start” was tweaked carefully so I didn’t get “flash banged” at night, but instead, brought the LEDs from off to “night light” DIM level as fast as possible.
Potential Solutions
- Utilize the standard MultiLevel Switch Command Class in a Script to replicate the same behavior in HA.
- Set the Zwave dimmers to “idle” just below the “on threshold”. Supplying a low, continuous current to the driver, should keep it right on the edge of illumination, so when low “night light” DIM levels are called, a fast response in the light output is achieved.
I’m sure I can figure out Option 1 after skimming the forum for a bit, but from my time on HomeSeer, I found that the “tweaking” for this option was very fickle. Example: if the lights had been on recently and were still warm, executing this script would cause the lights to actually overshoot, resulting in the “flash bang” effect. In this regard, I think Option 2 is better, as there is no risk of accidental over shoot and blinding yourself at night. The flip side is this likely will cause premature wear and damage to the dimmer circuits and the light + driver, as they will be at a very low duty cycle for ~8 hours, every night of the year.
So, if you were in my situation, which Option would you go with? Or even better, please propose some alternate options if you have them! Thanks for reading!
Best,
JB