Approaches to moving from room to room

[jtara92101]

I'm horrible about leaving lights on. I live alone, so no multiple-occupant complications. Should be easy to fix with an ISY, right?

 

I've got two approaches in mind, and interested in hearing from others who have taken a similar approach, but also open to other ideas.

 

I don't like the idea of occupancy sensors. False-triggers and the opposite - failure to sense occupancy.

 

I've considered two approaches - either have lights in the rest of the house automatically turn off when I turn on the lights in an area, or else assign a keypad button to mean "I'm occupying this room exclusively". Rather opposite approaches.

 

I should mention that I have quite a number of keypadlincs - bedroom, office, kitchen, entry, and each bathroom. So, no problem finding buttons.

 

The first approach would require a "guest mode" to disable the automatic shutting-off of lights in the rest of the house. I'd use this when I have guests or when I'm moving about the house doing maintainence, cleaning, etc. It strikes me that this might get somewhat annoying, though. I'd be happy with setting the "guest mode" from a single keypad location, say at the front door.

 

The second approach has the advantage of not needing the "guest mode". I'd just have to train myself to activate the "I'm staying in this room" button when I'm settling-in to an area. I suppose a second keypress would essentially do nothing (except turn off the LED). Perhaps a double-tap would turn off the LED and light an exit path from the area.

 

With the first approach (using the on/off buttons instead of an "I'm staying here" button) off could light an exit path, while a double-tap would just be "off" for the area. Or vice-versa.

 

Any other ideas? Anybody using a similar program, and how has it worked out for you?

 

(So, far, I've implemented only a very small subset of this, which has worked out well for me. It's the "master bathroom off with master bedroom" program. Since the master bath door is inside the master bedroom, I have the ISY turn off the bathroom lights when I turn off the bedroom lights. Haven't done the same with the guest bath, since it's accessed from the hall outside my guest bedroom/office.)

[art]

I understand that you are not in favor of occupancy sensors, BUT, consider a variation. Since you are the only person in your home, when you enter a room, have the sensor turn on that room's lights and turn off the other rooms. No need to worry about the computer turning the lights off on you or having constant motion since because you would program the system to ignore a lack of motion. That said, the lights would stay on forever in the room you are in until you went to the next room and those lights turned on and the room you were in turned off. This would work great if you didn't have company, and you could always have a toggle button to override the system when you do have guests. The system could also turn off any auxillary lights that were not turned by the system such as the following: You enter the bedroom and the system turns on the ceiling light, but then you manually turn on a closet light and a night stand light. When you leave the room, as noted by a hallway sensor, the hallway lights turn on and all lights in the bedroom and the bedroom closet turn off.

[apostolakisl]

I think your idea about turning lights on in one area turning off lights in other areas is probably a pretty good approach if you live alone.

 

If you put all of those programs into a single folder you can then easily de-activate the whole folder for your "guest" mode. You could program a kpl button to turn the folder on and off.

 

Your programs I suppose would be quite long as you would have to pretty much list every other room light in the house in the "if" condition.

 

You might consider writing the program such that if another room light turns on and stays on for a few minutes then it shuts the other room off. This way if you just want to run into the other room for a second to pick something up it won't shut the other room off. Of course you do have to shut the other room light off when you leave.