How best to control lights?

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1

Hi there - thanks for any help.

We’ve got a few Echo Dots around the house, which I use to control a Phillips Hue Bridge and various different brands of smart bulbs we have.

My wife hates the system - we have young children and generally tiptoe around at night, and she wants to be able to control the lights without talking.

The Alexa app is a bit slow, and to be honest my wife isn’t a fan of using an app - she’d prefer just using the light switches!

What sort of automation are people using?

Thanks a lot.

2

I use PIRs wired to a Pi MQTT server to tum on lights in thoroughfares.

For the living room the lights increase in brightness with decreasing light level outside (BH1750 + ESP8266 + ESPhome) if I’m home and turn off when my bed occupancy sensor is tripped.

I’m manually switching the kitchen lights at the moment but plan to put them on a PIR when I can afford more smart bulbs.

3

Thanks tom_l that’s very useful.

I suppose at the moment, my main “want” is an easy way to switch off all lights downstairs in a simple, silent way.

(I did harbour fantasies of repurposing a redundant Amazon Dash Button I’ve got lying around somewhere (I think it’s designed to order more beer - so not the end of the world if I don’t repurpose it properly!)

4

i use hue dimmer remotes on the bedside table with dales mqtt bridge. We have different scenes linked to the four buttons, one of which is a nightime/all off kinda thing. works really well.


5

For a simple use case such as this that would work perfectly well. The dash button does have a 3-4 second lag so you have to take that into account, not to mention the annoying notification that keeps telling you that the dash button isn’t setup properly to reorder something every time you use it. :slightly_frowning_face:

6

I turned off notifications for the app on my phone, and set an email filter to send those emails straight into the trash. No more annoyance! :smile:

7

I tried that but then I lost all the notifications for deliveries that I actually wanted to get as well. Unless I didn’t turn it off correctly which is a good possibility too.

8

I doubt you did anything wrong :slight_smile: I don’t really care about delivery notifications since I don’t need to know exactly when something is delivered. Delivery information from my email is good enough for me, thankfully. The fewer notifications, the better!