I see room presence mentioned on these forums quite often with different people talking about different ways to achieve it, or trouble achieving it.
My question is what do most people want to use room presence for? In other words, what are they hoping to achieve?
Do they want the room lights to turn on/off automatically. Or something less reaction time sensitive like music turning on and off automatically.? Or something even less time sensitive like changing the room’s thermostat?
The reason I ask this is because I’m wondering what type of reaction time people are hoping for? For example, when they walk in a room, how fast to expect the automation to happen?
Also, would people prefer a high level of accuracy versus fast reaction time?
Or maybe it’s just case by case? If so, what is the most common usage case in your experience?
EDIT: I’m thinking more of a multi room situation where the user wants the HA to figure out which room they are in. So as they walk around the house to different rooms, the HA knows where they are. Maybe “room presence” is not the right wording for that?
Just me: avoid shutting on/off things when someone is in a room, where a (my) normal motiong sensors donot register that. I have a Aqara P1 which was supposed to also register entry/exit and zones but it is not accurate enough…P2 supposed to be better
I would like a perfect presence detection system to be, in order of priority:
person independent, so no “tracker devices” required and any person can be detected
reliable, so no false-positives/negatives due to door moving or people walking outside the room
able to detect static presence, so it doesn’t require any constant movement from the detected people once it has detected them. It should (worst-case scenario) be able to detect me even if sleeping, without any movement under a thick blanket
fast enough for triggering lights (~3s trigger time)
Able to be covered/mounted out of sight behind a shelf without compromising detection
My current system checks all points except (sometimes) point 2, but that’s because I have my door opening to the inside, exactly where my detection zones are.
I have a ton of stuff I control with my 2 LD2450 mmWave sensors in my bedroom, mainly lights but also my PC monitors only turn on automatically when someone is physically there, and not when I’m away and access it from my Laptop.
The problems I currently have with my setup are:
bad static detection (which, I think, is the tradeoff for the X/Y positioning that the LD2450 has), I try to compensate that by using two zones near the entrance door to get a “counter” of people in the room
the sensor detects the moving (wooden) door as a person, because unfortunately it opens towards the inside and the “counting zones” are exactly in the way of the door…
I use presence sensors where I want lights to stay on and a PIR simply won’t suffice, such as while I’m in the shower, or sitting on a couch.
For the shower situation I have one flush mounted in the ceiling and it works perfectly. For the couch situation it’s a wall mounted and also works great, haven’t had the lights turn off on my yet. In both cases I have PIR’s as well which are also added as ‘turn on’ triggers. This was simply because it was there first in the shower situation, and for the couch one, the device has both sensors so it was a no-brainer.
Keeping the lights on in my garage while busy tinkering. IR motionsensor won’t do that reliably, but it is faster to respond. So I use the IR to turn it on and presence to keep it on.
As others have said, where PIR fails, presence usually does really well. I have at least one presence sensor in most rooms. Works really well for my desk where I don’t move a lot or when I’m in the kitchen just standing at the sink or the stove. I used to have multiple PIR sensors for that and they would sometimes miss me not moving so much. At one point I was going to go for a pressure sensor in mats or my chair, but that just didn’t really feel right for “room presence”.
Entry/Exit into a room. The Aqara P2 is pretty good at this (although, interference can be a pain). When I walk into a room, I want the lights/devices to respond before I sit down and I want them to stay on/off when I’m not moving.
I have input_number helpers for each “room” that count up or down as each room presence sensor detects people. Then I have automations that look at those and will shut down an entire room if the number of people is zero. Works really great for things like my dogs walking around the house. With PIR sensors, they learned they could walk around the house turning on lights when they wanted attention. Presence sensors has “fixed” that (much to their chagrin ). I have the sensors high enough that my dogs can’t trigger them. I couldn’t really figure out how to do that well with PIR sensors as much. So now, my automations always include a check for both presence and PIR detection.
). I have the sensors high enough that my dogs can’t trigger them. I couldn’t really figure out how to do that well with PIR sensors as much. So now, my automations always include a check for both presence and PIR detection.