Room Presence Detection

1

So i’m currently working on room by room presence detection.

I want to turn lights on and off and scene based on when someone enters a room and have it turn off after a certain amount of time after.

My first thought was motion, but they were hit or miss and the cooldown time i didn’t like. Also if i was eating dinner, my lights would turn off because they didn’t detect motion for that set amount of time.

So then I started to look at BLE. I looked into room assistant, but i already have PIs running LMS and squeezeboxes in every room and didn’t want to add another PI to every room. So i found ESPresence and bought some ESP32’s and got it up and running. And it did suprisingly well at figuring out what room i was in. but it was slow…took maybe 1-2 minutes to update my location per room. Also i didn’t like the idea of always having to have a tracker on my person, maybe if it was close to instant that wouldn’t be an issue, but it is…so that idea…for now, is out.

So I came upon a thread on here that used PIR as well as energy monitoring to tell weather a room is occupied or not. Also i swapped up my “dumb” zigbee motion sensors used from the alarm world and got some Phillips hue occupancy sensors (thoes made a world of difference) and got a few TP Link KP115s.

The thought is to have a “Occupancy” boolean setup for every room that when there is no motion, but when the KP115s are drawing current (setup on most used appliances in each room) to turn on and show the room as occupied, and turn off when both the PIR is not sensing motion and there is no current draw from the KP115s.

This is the only way that i can see to get the quickness of PIR for timing lights, but with the accuracy of actually being able to tell if someone is in a room being still, or not…

is there anyone that has gone through this same struggle and have found a viable solution that has worked for them?

2

What pir sensor did you use? What thread did you found and how did you do the wiring. Want to test this for myself.
Did found out that it depends widely on what phone you use. My wife’s phone reports twice as fast with the same setting. The found is like 2 years older than mine

3

I’ve had a similar idea, but I’m still in the observe and research mode… so I’ve been watching the sensors I do have and noticed that nearly all sensors for room occupancy have a blind spot of one kind or another…

I have a Honeywell T10 Pro thermostat… and that unit has the ability to have temp sensors in each room… these sensors also have occupancy… you can set the thermostat to run based on temp at the thermostat, use any combination of temps in the home, OR use occupancy… I also have nest protect (smoke detectors) in each room and a few extra places in the home, they also have occupancy sensors… all of these are connected to my HA install… the T10 and its sensors come into HA as individual sensors, so I see them all, including the occupancy… and the nest as well…

so what I noticed is that when a person is in the nest bind spot, the T10 sees them… and when the T10 doesn’t see them, the nest does… and a few situations where the person is seen by both… only a small small few instances where neither sensor sees occupancy…

so my thought here is using multiple sensor types to get the job done… in my case, I already have the individual sensors in each room (area) in HA… all that’s needed is to have HA use multiple sources to set a condition…

hope that helps you… or at least might give you some ideas…