I posted a note on Reddit tonight to introduce this sensor. One guy responded asking for use cases for this. So... I posted back (and below). If you guys have other use cases, I'd love to hear them. Please post here!
My use cases for my HS-FLS100+
Problems I had
In my case, I already had a conventional motion-activated floodlight fixture installed over my garage. However, it's a detached garage and I did not have a switch for it inside the house. So, my floodlights ONLY came on when motion was sensed and they ALWAYS turned off after the manually-set timeout of 5 minutes. This caused two problems for me. (1) My after-hours view of the driveway was always dark unless someone (or my dog) tripped the sensor. (2) I'd end up snow-blowing the driveway in the dark 5 minutes after I ventured out of range of the sensor (where my driveway meets the road)! After I installed an early test unit (which I still need to replace), I created the following events to fix those issues:
Events that solved them
A Problem I didn't really think I had
This was not exactly a "problem" but was just something I got used to. My system had always been programmed to turn lights on in the house 30 minutes before sunset. I set that up because it always gets dark in my house about a 1/2 hour before sunset. HOWEVER, that's not a precise calculation as "dark" relative to sunset is not linear at every time of the year. Also (and this is more important), it gets dark inside quite a bit earlier on a rainy or overcast day. Like I said... not really a problem; more of an annoyance. However, I fixed this too with the new sensor.
Event
Anyway that works really well! Today was a very rainy, overcast day and the lights were already on inside when I got home from work. Hope that helps you some!
My use cases for my HS-FLS100+
Problems I had
In my case, I already had a conventional motion-activated floodlight fixture installed over my garage. However, it's a detached garage and I did not have a switch for it inside the house. So, my floodlights ONLY came on when motion was sensed and they ALWAYS turned off after the manually-set timeout of 5 minutes. This caused two problems for me. (1) My after-hours view of the driveway was always dark unless someone (or my dog) tripped the sensor. (2) I'd end up snow-blowing the driveway in the dark 5 minutes after I ventured out of range of the sensor (where my driveway meets the road)! After I installed an early test unit (which I still need to replace), I created the following events to fix those issues:
Events that solved them
- Floodlights now turn on & off when I triple-tap the dimmer (HS-WD200+) that controls my breezeway lighting. This allows me to see a lighted view of the driveway any time I want AND it fixes my snowblower problem too because the motion timeout is ignored when the lights are controlled with Z-Wave commands.
- I have another event that causes the 3rd LED on my dimmer to turn magenta. It will GLOW magenta when the lights are turned on by Z-Wave. It will BLINK magenta when the lights are turned on by motion (did this with another event). I added this tweak to remind me to turn off the lights if I turned them on "manually" and also to give me a heads-up if someone (or my dog) was in the driveway.
A Problem I didn't really think I had
This was not exactly a "problem" but was just something I got used to. My system had always been programmed to turn lights on in the house 30 minutes before sunset. I set that up because it always gets dark in my house about a 1/2 hour before sunset. HOWEVER, that's not a precise calculation as "dark" relative to sunset is not linear at every time of the year. Also (and this is more important), it gets dark inside quite a bit earlier on a rainy or overcast day. Like I said... not really a problem; more of an annoyance. However, I fixed this too with the new sensor.
Event
- I created an event that turns on INSIDE lights when the floodlight sensor LUX level has been less than 180 for more than 3:05 minutes. I use that interval because the sensor reports it's LUX value precisely every 3 minutes. So, in fact, the sensor would need to report under 180 twice (consecutively). I did that to avoid turning on lights because of an intermittent cloud or 2. I arrived at the "180" value by simply waiting until it was noticeably dark inside and then checking the LUX value.
Anyway that works really well! Today was a very rainy, overcast day and the lights were already on inside when I got home from work. Hope that helps you some!
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