Lights off in the morning.

I have night lights (on c-bus) that are on in case the kids wake up. They often forget to turn them off in the morning.

Is there any way I can use my light level sensor(SENLL) or multisensor (SENPILL) to switch off the lights at dawn.

Both the sensors are in different rooms with lights comming on at different times.

Thanks in advance

Robert

 

You can use the PIR Sunset feature built into both those sensors for this. The sunset feature is designed to turn a group address On when the light level falls below a certain threshold and turn it off when either the timer expires or the light level rises above the threshold again. To ignore the Sunset timer just set the timer value to zero.

An alternative is to use a C-Bus product with the logic engine built in (PAC, Colour C-Touch, B&W C-Touch MKII with logic) that calculates sunset and sunrise times and turns the nightlight on and off appropriately. A PAC would give you extra flexibility in writing some logic to, say, turn on the night light at 9pm and turn it off at sunrise, for example, but it's a bit more effort than the light level based detection mechanism built into the motion sensors.

 

Newman,

Thanks you for your reply.

I tried your first suggestion (I don't have a PAC). It worked to an extent.

The problem I had was that when we walked into the laundry room that the sensor is located in the night light went off and then, stangely, came on full (night light is dimmed). I guess the light coming on in the laundry room makes the sensor think it is now dawn and swithes off the night light upstairs.

Thanks again

Robert

 

Revising the first suggestion a bit, go to the Functions Tab of the unit and change the Sunset functions to Recall 1, Start, Start, Idle. Set your Recall 1 level to the desired brightness for your night light. Then, over on the Blocks Tab, set the Timer 1 value to however long you want the nightlight to be on for, say 10 hours. Make sure the Timer Expiry command is set to Off .

When the light level drops below the threshold the unit will turn on the nightlight and then start the timer. Any subsequent increase in light level (due to entering the laundry) will leave the night light turned on and not affect the timer duration.

As a simple alternative, how about a button that you press on a switch to turn on the night lights that runs a 10 hour timer? The LED blinking during the timer run can be turned off if it's annoying.

 

Hi Newman

The summer nights are shorter than winter so I'd prefer not to use a timer.

Bed times vary so I'd like to switch on the light by hand.

It seems strange that there is a Sunset function but not a Dawn one !

I also have a light level sensor SENLL and note there is a "Light On/Off" group. Can I use the that just to switch off the light ? Does the status report timer (global Tab) delay reporting so I get out of the room and the light goes off ?

Thanks

Robert

 

For the SENLL, the Light On/Off group gets turned on when the light level is below the target and turned off when the light level is above the target. If you're just after on/off control in response to light level then it might do the job for you. By adjusting the Margin parameter you might even be able to get it to ignore the lighting spill coming from the laundry, depending upon where the unit is located.

The Global Tab Status Report interval is related to network error correction only. It relates to a low-level admin functions only.

 

Bit of logic required here.

Nightlights are controlled by a dimmer channel. If you add a logic channel in the dimmer so that the nightlight level is determined by the 'MIN' combination of a logic group and the normal group you use to turn on the nightlight, then you can achieve an over-ride OFF while still being able to control the nightlight manually. Set up your manual switch to turn on both the nightlight and the logic group at the same time. For positive control, configure the keys like so: Short press = Idle, Short release = Recall1, long press = Rampoff, and Long release = Idle. This will allow you positive control to turn on the nightlights manually, and to force them off with a long press if you want.

Now set up a SENPILL 'sunset' key as Onkey/offkey/idle/offkey and use that to control only the logic group. This means that the logic group can always disable the nightlight when the light level gets high enough.

If you want to use a SENLL ON / OFF group, this must be the only thing that SENLL is doing. The SENLL will always turn ON the group below the thresho;d and turn it OFF above the threshold, so that should work as well.


The status report timer will have no affect on any timings of controlled events; the status report time is related to the main reliability enhancing feature of C-Bus and should be left as default (3 seconds) unless you have a very busy network with multiple applicatoins operating, in which case the status report interval can be extended to more than 3 seconds.