So, I want the following to happen, does anyone have any advice the best way to make the conditions in HA?
If it’s bright outside, close the blind and turn on the light If it’s dark outside, close the blind and turn on the light If it’s anywhere in between, keep the blind open - if it’s ‘dark enough’ turn on the light as well.
I haven’t bought any lux sensors yet. I do believe it’s a lux sensor I need. Can I make this automation with 1 (pointing outside and using that value to control both the light and blind) or would I need to have 2? (I assume, one pointing outside controlling the blind, the other in the room controlling the light?
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I’ve made an automation that uses sun azimuth as the trigger (window is otherwise shaded), with outside temperature and cloud cover conditions so it’ll stay open if it’s cloudy or cool outside. You could add cloud cover triggers to activate while the sun is in the azimuth range to open the blind if it goes from sunny to cloudy too. Toggling the light can be an action alongside the blind.
I use the met.no integration for temperature and cloud cover entities.
the ‘actual daylight level’ is my main automation trigger. I used to do it using the azimuth but that didn’t cover rainy days or days with a clouded sky so I added the lux sensor of my outside motion sensor into this. until the battery went out during a holiday. I now have a template sensor named ‘reliable light level’. It uses the actual lux sensor as the main value, if that is not available I use the sun azimuth and do some calculations with the date and time to get a light level. after that it was a bit of trying things out to find the perfect levels for
- turn on light in the staircase with motion
- turn the staircase lights on completely
- shut the blinds when it’s too sunny
I do this by activating different mode booleans (dim, dark, light) so the automations are triggered by them turning on or off and Incan also check the state of these in the automation conditions.
One sensor should be enough. I believe they usually mount onto the inside of the window facing outwards so that lights and movement in the room don’t influence it.
The simplest way of solving this would be with technically four separate automations. However you can place them all in the same HA Automation using multiple triggers and trigger IDs. (Or have one for the blinds and one for the lights with two triggers each)
I’m going to assume the blinds are somewhat light translucent.
For the blinds use a numeric trigger that fires if the lux value is over some threshold for let’s say 10 minutes. That way it won’t trigger for every tiny cloud. When triggered lower the blinds.
Add another numeric trigger for moving back up when the lux value is under some threshold for 10 mins. Test to make sure that lowering or raising the blinds doesn’t darken or lighten the room enough to immediately have it trigger the other trigger. If it does then increase the difference between the two thresholds.
Copy the same procedure for the lights. The timer can be shorter here, maybe try 1 minute. Make sure that the thresholds are low enough as otherwise lowering the blinds would immediately turn the lights on. I would suggest first tuning the blind triggers and then tuning the light thresholds to your liking.
If you can’t set the light thresholds low enough so that the blinds don’t interfere with them you’ll need a somewhat smarter automation but I’d try the easy way first.
Yeah, this is what I was thinking, though I didn’t consider that the sensor facing outwards might get a different lux value if blinds are up or down with the same cloud state. I thought they’d literally be directional, having not had one before. Thanks!
