How-To
Updated October 29, 2007 07:30 PDT
How to Automate Your Holiday Lighting
By David Powell
The holiday seasons are approaching fast and what better
way to celebrate than to decorate with lights. There are
several Z-Wave products on the market today that will make
automating your fall and winter festive decorations a piece
of cake.
Controllers
First you are going to need a controller. This can be either
a USB controller coupled with software or a hardware controller
such as a handheld, tabletop, or even more elaborate an
Elk M1 Gold System. They each provide a different level
of logic control. A handheld or table top controller could
be programmed to simply turn the lights on and off at a
scheduled time or at sunrise and sunset while the software
and Elk M1 Gold controllers allow more sophisticated logic
to be performed, which can be used for synchronized light
animation. This article is not about the various controllers
but I would be more than happy to answer any questions you
have on our Forums.
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Figure 1: Outdoor plug-in module
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Devices
Most of your lights will be displayed outdoors, which means
you need devices suited for that type of environment. One
of my favorite Z-Wave enabled devices for holiday decorations
is the
Intermatic HomeSettings Outdoor Plug-In Module
(see figure 1). These come in handy when you need to temporarily
plug multiple strands of lights on separately controlled
circuits (such as when you want to animate the decorations).
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Figure 2: PIR
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Another device you may not normally think about using with
your decorations is a Z-Wave Wireless Motion Sensor (see
figure 2). You could use this device to trigger another
Z-Wave device such as the above Outdoor Plug-In Module or
an In-Wall Receptacle. Imagine the look on the face of your
"trick or treating" guest as they walk up to your
dark home and a scary ghoul face lights up behind your window.
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Figure 3: Receptacle and six-plugger
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What am I doing?
Currently I am keeping it simple. I am using an InTouch
Z-Wave Receptacle (see figure 3) and a "six-plugger"
GFCI protected strip rated for outdoor use. I recently installed
the receptacle outdoors, which is what sparked the idea
for this article, and got me thinking of what I could do
for the winter holidays. I am using ControlThink's ThinkEssentials
2.0 software along with an Intermatic USB Stick as my controller.
I have programmed ThinkEssentials to turn the lights on
at sunrise and off at sunset. Hey, it's a start.
David Powell is ZWaveWorld's contributing editor.
