Hey guys, I’m thinking about setting up HA. A big positive would be if our bedroom lights (Feit brand) turned on when we enter the room.
Or similarly in my office, I have an LED light that plugs in to a power strip, so I could use a motion sensor + a Wemo power switch I already have to trigger my office light to turn on.
What motion sensor works and isn’t expensive?
Sidebar: also, is it possible to link a wifi connected light switch to operate our Feit bulbs? The lamp is plugged in to a socket that doesn’t connect to the only light switch in the room and it gets old having to tell Google home every time we enter or leave the room.
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I have all my houses completely smart outfitted. Except the bedrooms. Yes you can have a wireless switch control a wireless light. I do that everywhere because then nobody gets confused and flips a switch.
I haven’t touched a light switch in years. Every room has mmWave sensors either in the ceiling or on a shelf or both. You walk in, lights go on. Leave the room for a minute, lights go off.
The problem is a bedroom where that doesn’t work. When are lights on? When you’re in the room and not in bed? Ok. That’s a lot more complicated. Get up in the middle of the night to pee, now the whole room is blasting light and waking up your partner. Reach for your phone, detected as motion outside the bed, inter of a tip lights come on. It never seems to work because too many variations.
Because of that I keep a remote by the bed. The light switch works, the phone apps work, the voice assistants work, all as usual just no automatic sensor. Then in addition the remote by the bed can turn the lights on full, one bulb dim, or off. One for each side.
I have never used Feit lights with Home Assistant, but yes, my bedroom lights turn on when it senses motion. That automation disables when my living room lights are off (assuming we turn them off at bedtime) or when my phone plugs in to charge (which I do at bedtime). I use a motion sensor by Phillips Hue, and it integrates directly with the Home Assistant Yellow thru its Zigbee radio without an additional hub.
I can’t speak to the Feit brand so you’ll have to look how to control those, so the home assistant forums are your best bet for integrating those. Wemo brand does have an integration, so it should not be too hard to use those. As far as presence detection, these athom sensors have worked well for me, however I have not used them in bedroom where people are in bed sleeping.
Yes home assistant allows you to take actions based on the state of other smart devices. For example, when I turn on my foyer light, that also trigger my hallway lights to turn on.
Having gone through your journey about a year ago (complete with coming from Feit lights and plugs), I don’t think you’re going to find an integration that lets you control them (but if you do, please let me know!)
I use a lot of aquaria sensors (water/temp/presence), sengeled bulbs and outlets, and I think third reality is who makes my motion detectors. I’ve got my office, living room, kitchen/dining room and basement all hooked up with motion or presence activated lights, most of which have scenes that control what light is what color when. Definitely worth investing in equipment that hooks into HA natively, you can hack a lot of stuff together, but it’s so much nicer when things just work.
I ended up going with a zigbee coordinator from Tubes ZB, as it was one of the better recommended ones, but you can go with a cheaper option if it fits your use case. I needed a network coordinator since my HA is virtual and wanted flexibility in where my stuff lives.
I use Aqara motion sensors. They are cheap (Ali express), battery operated (can put them anywhere) and have always worked for me.
They are ZigBee, so the caveat is that you will need a dongle to use them. Mine is a Zig Ah Zig Ah from ElectroLlama and cosy under £20.
The reason I moved from WIFI to ZigBee is for reliability. WiFi just isn’t reliable. Any mains powered ZigBee device (bulbs, switches) are also usually routers, so the signal can be bunny hopped between nodes in the ZigBee network, unlike WiFi.
Also yes, one of the beautiful things about HA is that it is the middle man between many many different manufacturers of smart home appliances, so if you automate your main lights you should be able to add in a plugged in lamp to the automation.
Definitely not on the cheap side, but maybe you won’t find one: the Hue ecosystem works quite fine for me for years now. I’m just setting up motion sensor and light on the bridge and then they are also discoverable by HA and then setting up automation inside HA. It would work the same with Hue power switch.
Once again, this is more pricey solution, but I’m also building my system gradually, so it’s manageable.
save money. buy wizz bulb and pir. done.