Vacation mode - automatic lights with random (to replicate "living")

[nikagl]

Hi all,

I have been trying to find something that automates my house during holiday, ie. events running my lights on interval basis, preferably random for a certain range, so my lighting looks like I am still at home.

Off course I can setup numerous events to replicate this (and a virtual device that allows me to set "vacation mode", but I was wondering whether something already exists that does that automatically, preferably by looking at my usage during the past weeks (ie. what lamps are on during what times and use a randomizer to do the same around similar times).

Regards,

Nika.

[huggy_d1]

Hi all,

I have been trying to find something that automates my house during holiday, ie. events running my lights on interval basis, preferably random for a certain range, so my lighting looks like I am still at home.

Off course I can setup numerous events to replicate this (and a virtual device that allows me to set "vacation mode", but I was wondering whether something already exists that does that automatically, preferably by looking at my usage during the past weeks (ie. what lamps are on during what times and use a randomizer to do the same around similar times).

Regards,

Nika.

A better concept might be to have homeseer learn your habits for 7 days, then create an event to play-back the learned habits - with some exclusions via configuration options...

You could just go through your old logs, with something like UltraLog, and playback device changes and event triggers at a similar time.

You can also simply create some randomized events to toggle lights for certain periods of time, and trigger them when the home is on vacation mode.

[Rupp]

Part of this is built into HomeSeer. Check out the Security Offset +/-: and Security Mode Currently Enabled:
Using these and the Security (randomize time triggers) on the Trigger tab for events you can randomize events.

[Pete]

You can also play music or turn on various TV's in the home to give the appearance you are home; even have Homeseer play barking dogs wav sounds at various times during the day...its up to your imagination what you can do with Homeseer.

[nightwalker]

I use blrandom to simulate activity. It doesn't learn your routines but is rather a manual setup but it works nicely and can be turned on or off with a simple script statement.

[nikagl]

Thanks all! I've used the security feature for now, turning on some lights based on sunset and turning them off again at fixed times (with security randomization). I have seen it adds the security offset when saving the event, I assume it changes the offset after the event was triggered? Will be testing tomorrow

Regards,

Nika.

[Bill Brower]

http://bladeplugins.no-ip.org/BLOccupied/

[nightwalker]

http://bladeplugins.no-ip.org/BLOccupied/

Oops, thanks Bill, that was the plug-in I meant to reference. He's got so many it's hard to keep the names straight.

[nikagl]

Although I do like the plugin, it lacks the ability to set the order in which the devices need to be turned on. Therefore mimicing the daily behavior (for instance going upstairs)...

[nikagl]

I may be mistaken, and this will need more investigation, but it looks like the times chosen during creation of the Vacation events, where randomly chosen at the time creating them, but do not change when the event was triggered (ie. when you set it to 30 minutes, turn a lamp on at 21:00 with the security features, you'd expect it to turn on at for instance 20:52 and 21:03 the next day, etc.).

Regards,

Nika.

[langenet]

Part of this is built into HomeSeer. Check out the Security Offset +/-: and Security Mode Currently Enabled:
Using these and the Security (randomize time triggers) on the Trigger tab for events you can randomize events.

Sorry Rupp... but where's this?

[Uncle Michael]

Take a look at the Setup page, General tab.

[nikagl]

And after enabling security, make sure to enable the Security setting in the event trigger tab:



By the way, I couldn't find an attach option in this board - how did you attach your picture (I used my own webserver to host it)? Or does someone need to enable that on my account?

Regards,

Nika.

[nikagl]

Note that I prefer to use a Virtual Device to enable "vacation mode" as I can use HSTouch and other remote options to enable it without having to go into the configuration (thats why it has the Group 1 condition)...