Schedules and automations

Almost everybody who buys their first smart plug spends an evening building an elaborate scene system, and almost nobody is still using it a year later. The automations that last are boring, and they last because they are right nearly every time they fire.

Notice what is not on that list. Motion-triggered living room lights, per-room presence detection, and anything that depends on knowing which human is in which room all fail the six-month test, because the cost of a false trigger is much higher than the benefit of a correct one. Motion has one genuinely good application, and it is a hallway or a closet - covered in motion sensors and timers.

The single biggest improvement you can make to an existing schedule is to change its trigger from a clock time to sunset.

A fixed evening time is correct for roughly two weeks in spring and two in autumn. In December it fires long after the room went dark; in June it fires in broad daylight and you switch it off manually, which is how a schedule gets deleted. Sunset with an offset of fifteen to thirty minutes earlier tracks the actual reason you wanted the lights on.

Bedtime is the opposite case and should stay on the clock, because it is tied to your routine rather than to the sky. Same for a wake-up fade.

A second thing worth checking before you build anything: whether the schedule lives on the device or in the cloud. A smart plug or outlet that stores its schedule locally keeps running when the broadband drops. One that evaluates schedules in the cloud does nothing. Both types exist at similar prices and the difference only becomes visible on the evening you most want the lights on.

The failure mode of automated lighting is not technical. It is a guest, a babysitter, or a household member with a flat phone battery standing in a dark room looking for a switch that no longer does anything.

So every automated light needs a physical control. There are three good options and they suit different setups.

• The plug's own button. Free, already there, and enough for a single lamp. Its weakness is that it is at floor level behind furniture.
• A wireless remote. A Pico remote sticks to a wall exactly where a switch should have been, drives up to ten devices, and Lutron publishes a ten-year typical battery life. It is the closest thing to a real switch that involves no wiring at all - the format is covered in wireless wall remotes.
• A dimmer in the lamp's cord. A Caseta plug-in lamp dimmer sits between the lamp and the outlet, so the lamp can be scheduled, dimmed from an app, and also operated by hand.

This is also the argument for automating at the plug or the lamp rather than at the bulb. A smart bulb loses its brain when someone flips the wall switch it depends on; a smart plug with a remote does not have that failure mode. The full comparison is in smart bulbs vs smart switches.