Z-Wave Motion

[brmeeke]

Hi

My HS4 setup has about 20 Insteon devices in my home today and I am adding few Z-Wave devices to fill holes in my systems capabilities. As an example, I use Z-Wave to control my Schlage door lock. Works great.

Now for my problem. I am becoming more and more unhappy with my Insteon motion detectors. They seem to get stuck on a Motion setting which means that the light that they are controlling never turns off. I have the Insteon motion directly linked to the Insteon switch to minimize reaction time when someone enters the room. My ideal is that the switch turns the light on but I use an event with multiple conditions to turn the light switch off after the motion detector has changed state.

Are all of those capabilities possible with Z-Wave?

Thanks

Brian

[crossedswords]

Hi Brian,

I would say yes, you can achieve your goals with z-wave. I have the homeseer sensors that are battery powered and the Aeotec multi-sensors powered through USB. They control light switches mainly, or a scene controller, and as the light switch changes to ON, I also start timers to shut off at a later time and run events to control this. Motion continually restarts the timers, so the lights stay on when the room is occupied and for x-time, after the last trigger.

I recently started using the EasyTrigger plugin, so that I could build events that enable or disabled other events. By doing so, I have set up different times for the event triggers, so I can choose how long the timer runs before it starts its lights off routine. So for example, if I know I am going to work in a room for a long time, I enable say a 2h timer, while disabling the rest, whereas, in a normal state, it would be a 15m timer.

Mostly instant results, but sometimes a bit of a lag between motion and light ON. I run HS on a win 10 Home based platform. I believe that the lags build up when windows has downloaded updates and they sit in a queue waiting for my approval to install.

The only sensor + light ON combination that I have that is unreliable, is a HS door sensor on the door from the house to the garage, and typically, the first time the door is opened the lights do not come on and manually have to be switched ON, but after that, the lights come on throughout the day when the door is opened. I have no idea why this happens, except that I have never got the light switches inside my garage to work consistently either, although the garage door motion detectors for Open / close, that are battery driven have been running on the same batteries for 5 years and still report and respond immediately.

Hope this helps,

Steve

[brmeeke]

Thanks for the information. I’m going to play some more with my Trisensor and figure out a solution. Out of curiosity, any reason why dio you use timers instead of a test in your event that asks if the motion sensor has been in a No Motion state for more than x minutes?

[brmeeke]

Hi. I am continuing to play with events to come up with a good solution. I have something running with my Insteon gear. Trying to come up with a comparable Z-Wave solution.

will let you know how things work out.