How I Have Fully Automated Lights In My Home

Light automation has always been at the top of my list in my smart home.

Imagine walking into a room and having the lights come on with your preferred settings or your home lighting up as the sun sets, all on its own.

That’s the power of smart lighting automation.

Integrating automated lights is a key component of smart home control. It enables seamless lighting management alongside other devices like music, cameras, and climate systems for a unified home experience.

By integrating smart light switches and motion sensors into my home, I’ve discovered they’re about convenience and energy efficiency. When I’m away, I can control the lighting from my smartphone, turning it on to give the impression that someone is home or turning it off in case someone has forgotten.

While my setup is a little unusual compared to what’s available, you don’t need to be a tech whiz to set it up because it was still reasonably easy to configure.

Goal Of The Smart Lighting Project

When I decided to create an automated smart light system for my smart home, my top priority was simplicity. I envisioned a setup where I would never have to intervene manually; the lights would handle themselves, flexibly adapting to my family’s daily life.

I also wanted to be able to control them with my voice. While I already have Amazon Alexa devices at home, it made perfect sense to pick something compatible with Alexa that could work harmoniously.

While most of my home’s light fixtures have LED lights, I wanted to check if automated lighting can save money in the long run.

Smart Home Devices Used

Why Fibaro Ecosystem?

Personally, I really like the futuristic design of the Fibaro devices. They fit well with my home decor and can also be customized a little, as the light ring on the Walli switch matches the color of my walls.

Also, Fibaro’s system eradicated some of the issues I had with my previous Wi-Fi system.

It uses Z-Wave technology, which is more reliable for device communication than Wi-Fi and doesn’t overcrowd my wireless network. Plus, it’s so much faster. When someone enters a room, the lights instantly respond to the motion.

The Problem With My Previous Wi-Fi Smart Bulbs System

My journey to the Fibaro Ecosystem started with a bunch of annoyances. I had a Wi-Fi smart bulb system that, to be frank, left much to be desired. Here are a few pain points:

Responsiveness: I would tell my lights to switch on, and they would eventually do so. Sometimes, that lag between command and action was a daily frustration. Similarly, when motion has been detected, it wasn’t usually to wait a second or two for the light to switch on finally.
Connectivity: My old system was a little moody. Some days, it stayed connected to Wi-Fi for days; others, it would disconnect occasionally, and I would need to wait a while to reconnect.

Configuring Home Center 3 Lite

The configuration of Home Center 3 Lite was pretty standard. Just follow this guide, and you should be able to run it quickly on your home network.

Once configured, you should have your username and password created, which you can use to access the home center’s interface in your browser or mobile app.

Here, you can see the dashboard on my setup.

How To Add Any New Device

Pairing new devices is quite simple. All you need to do is start the learning process on the home center, which can be accessed from settings via the orange button.

Then, start the inclusion process on the hub and pairing mode on the device. The pairing mode will differ based on the device type, but it usually involves clicking a button 3 times for the light to start flashing.

Experimenting With Motion Sensor Settings

I’ve spent quite a lot of time experimenting with motion sensor settings to find a perfect balance between responsiveness and battery life. I have around 10 of those around my house, so it does make a difference if the battery lasts 12 rather than 6 months, which is more or less what you can expect with ideal settings without compromising functionality.

After experimenting with all the sensor parameters for over 2 years, I believe those are the most important ones:

Param 1 defines the sensitivity of a sensor for movement detection. I keep mine at max (8) in the bathroom to ensure the lights don’t go off during bath time, but 5 seems efficient everywhere else.

Param 2 is the blind time, which specifies an insensitivity to motion after the motion has been detected. Each number on that scale represents 0.5 seconds, so that it can be set to anything from 0.5 to 8 sec.

After experimenting for a while with this, my ideal number is 3. Any more than that, and if you forget something from a room after you just walked out, the lights may not come back, and it will be a dark house.

Illuminance reports are also pretty essential settings for me. In the end, you don’t want the lights to come on during the day, but only when the darkness reaches a certain point, which can vary significantly based on the position of the sensor in your home.

The sensor also has temperature and tamper settings, but I will not include them in this guide since they are unrelated to smart light automation.

Sensor Settings To Preserve Battery Life

To preserve the sensor’s battery as much as possible, I played with the visual LED indicator settings, lowering them significantly from the default setting since those don’t affect the functionality of a sensor but the brightness of the LED light that responds to different events.

Ideal Sensor Location

Finding the right spot for each motion sensor is essential to ensure you cover the entrances to each room well. Here are some things you should consider:

Height: Usually, I aim to place it around 6-9 feet off the ground for optimal coverage.
Angle: Getting the right angle will ensure good coverage. This is especially important when having multiple sensors between rooms, as you don’t want to trigger the sensor from the opposite room.
Obstruction: This is pretty obvious, but you don’t want any obstructions that may block the sensor view and affect the functionality.

Creating Smart Lights With Fibaro Walli Switch

Walli switches have exciting designs. You either love them or hate them. The single or double switch looks the same; the only difference is how you operate it.

I have kept most switch parameters as defaults and only explored the ones below. Here are some of the most important ones.

Parameter 11: The switch LED frame color when the light is switched on. It looks pretty good when you can match the wall color.
Parameter 12: The switch LED frame color when the light is switched off. I keep this off to preserve the LED light lifespan so they are not constantly switched on.
Parameter 13: The brightness of the LED lights. Mine are at max since I like their look when switched on.
Parameter 20: Button operations. In a single-switch mode, each button will switch both channels on and off. However, in double-switch mode, there is a button per channel that switches on and off.

Automating Smart Lighting Based on Motion

It’s time to combine the switch and motion sensor. Most of my light automation relies on a motion sensor and switch in each room, where I can fiddle with settings to make it perfect for that particular room.

Sensor Illumination Parameter

Sensor illumination plays a vital role in this automation because we don’t want the light to come on during the day when unnecessary. It determines how low the brightness outside needs to drop for the scene to trigger the light switching.

However, the installation of the sensor is highly subjective, as individual preferences vary. The positioning significantly influences the value of that parameter due to varying levels of light exposure in different areas. So it’s crucial to choose what is best for you.

Creating A Scene

Creating a scene is simple. Once you have configured all the devices, it’s mostly drag and drop, and you must experiment with the parameters.

For example, my scene involves turning on the smart lights in the kitchen based on the movement detected by motion sensors.

To configure a scene, I select the motion sensor in the kitchen and choose the state of motion detected as a trigger. Also, the illumination of the same sensor is less than 20 lux. That’s when it gets pretty dark, and it makes sense to turn on the lights. The final condition is that the light is turned off because if it’s on already, there’s no point in starting the scene.

Lastly, on the right, if all the conditions on the left are met, an action will be taken to turn on the kitchen lights.

The scene to turn the lights off is much simpler because as long as the light is on and there hasn’t been any motion for 3 minutes, the smart lighting will be turned off.

Why This Isn’t Perfect For Bathrooms

The above scenes work well in most rooms; the only difference is a timeout on motion detection, sensor sensitivity, or the lux (light intensity) parameter. However, I couldn’t get it to work quite well in the bathroom.

Sometimes, when having a bath, even on the highest sensitivity, the sensor does not detect the movement for 2-3 minutes, and the light goes off. This can be annoying because you must wave or stand up to get the lights back.

Increasing a timeout on motion detection was certainly an option. Still, the lights would be on for no reason when I was outside bathing or engaging in any more prolonged activity. I could switch them off manually, but the goal was full automation without manual intervention.

So, I decide to integrate door sensors in the bathrooms.

Perfect Scene For Bathrooms With Fibaro Door Sensor 2

Adding a door sensor to a bathroom allows me to improve bathroom scenes and consider whether a door is closed or open. Here is the scene to turn off the light when a door is open.

Not much has changed in functionality; we still switch the lights off after 1min of no motion. However, this extra sensor enables us to set a different motion timeout for closed doors using a separately configured scene.

When the doors are closed, we can assume that someone is inside doing something so that we can set the motion timeout to a bigger value, like 8 min, so when the sensor isn’t detecting any motion, it has a lot more time before the lights go off.

Since this scene requires the door to be closed, the home center will fall back to the previous scene when they are open using the short, more energy-efficient motion timeout.

Remote Control Via Fibaro Mobile Application

I find the Yubii mobile pretty good, as it remotely allows the smart home to control all the added devices. It lets you get an overview of your house, check which lights are on, start a scene, and get a detailed overview of each room.

I check it often before bed and when away from home to ensure no lights are switched on. Occasionally, a sensor may misbehave and need to be restarted to trigger a light in the room when nobody is there.

Once you click on an individual room, you can see all the devices associated with that room while being able to control it remotely.

Adding Voice Control With Amazon Alexa

Controlling all the devices remotely within one app is excellent, but taking it further and enabling voice control improves convenience.

I needed to add the Fibaro skill so that Alexa could discover all the devices.

I went to More in the Alexa app, followed by Skill & Games, and then searched for a Fibaro smart home skill.

I enabled the skill and followed the instructions on-screen to link it to my Fibaro account.

After hooking up the skill, Alexa automatically discovered my devices, and I can use commands to control the lighting around my home.

Control With Gestures Using Fibaro Swipe

My smart home game changed entirely when I got the Fibaro Swipe.

Imagine controlling your lights without fumbling for switches or even speaking to a voice assistant. Just swipe your hand in the air, and the lights obey.

Here’s how I got it configured works:

Swipe Up: Lights on.
Swipe Down: Lights off.
Circular Gesture: Dim the lights.
Advanced Scenes: Set up custom gestures for different lighting scenes.

It’s simple to set up and powered by batteries or a USB connection. So you can mount or place the Fibaro Swipe where it’s handy (it looks just like a picture frame), and it’ll blend into your decor seamlessly.

In my smart home ecosystem, you can match gestures with different automation. And believe me, once you start controlling your lights with a wrist flick, physical switches seem like ancient history.

Did My Smart Lighting System Save Money?

My main reason for installing smart lighting at home is that I enjoy experimenting with smart home devices. I already had LED lights in my house, and my monthly electricity bills were pretty low, yet the smart home system has further reduced them by about 25%.

If you had regular non-LED lights in a mid-size house, you could easily expect your electricity bills to hit around 100 monthly. With smart lighting and LED lights, you could drop it to about 25 based on good utilization.

The system undoubtedly has the potential to pay off itself after a couple of months, so it’s a good investment if you enjoy technology.