Hi.. I’m looking for ideas on how to manage my bedroom light automation without having to fiddle with a presence sensor. I currently have one but with my mobile AC in the summer or open windows its false positive way too often and tbh I don’t want to experiment with positioning and settings anymore to get it to work better.
What I have for sensors otherwise: a motion and a lux sensor
Getting the light to come on is no problem but keeping it on without a presence sensor is what I’m looking to solve. My main issue is when I go to sleep and maybe stay awake to doomscroll reddit a bit or sth. I’d love to simply have a timer but it wouldn’t work with me in bed without any additional conditions.
Do you have lights like this? What do you use for conditions etc.? Doesn’t have to be bedroom specific. Appreciate all the tips I can get
Could you use the battery charging state on your phone as a condition? If you don’t plug it in to charge before you want to sleep you could keep the lights on that way.
I use a boolean toggle and have my presence sensor automations check it before taking any action. I have a button that toggles the boolean on or off. If the toggle is on, no automation will change things. If it’s off then automations will run.
I charge my phone when I actually go to sleep so that wouldnt work but speaking of phone sensors. Surely there has to be a sensor that tells me whether the phone is in use or not. That would be a good condition
If you can afford it: I use the Withings sleep mat. That uses air / air pressure and is sensitive enough to detect breathing. So it does way more than just detect if you are in bed. It alerted me and my wife to sleep apnea.
The wasp-in-a-box suggestion is the right shape, and I can add a number for why the simple timer version of it fails.
I logged a 24 GHz presence sensor in a room for a few days and looked at the gaps: how long it said “nobody here” before saying “somebody here” again.
under 5 s 19%
5 to 10 s 9%
10 to 15 s 34%
15 to 45 s 12%
45 to 90 s 4%
90 s to 10 min 9%
over 10 min 13%
It is two humps with a thin middle. The 34% at 10-15 seconds is the sensor losing someone who is sitting still. The 13% over ten minutes is the room actually being empty.
My off automation had a 10 second delay, which sits right under the big hump, so it turned the light off on a person who simply had not moved. Moving it to 20 seconds took the share of dropouts it absorbs from 28% to over 60% and did not touch the real exits at all.
That does not help with your fan and open window, which is a different problem: moving air is a real target to a radar and no hold time fixes it. But if the light is going out while you are in bed on your phone, it may be the hold rather than the sensor, and that one is cheap to measure before you give up.
Maybe it works still but with other sensors, will have to look at that thanks