We have added a lot of smart home tech to our Victorian farmhouse, which has been fun, but the Eve Motion has been a bit of a game changer especially as we head into a winter where the energy crisis is at the top of many homeowners’ minds.
The Eve Motion controls your lights and appliances based on your presence (not schedules) which can be a good way to cut down your electricity usage at a time when tariffs have hit all-time highs.
The Eve Motion is highly customisable in the way you can set it up. You can set these devices to detect motion, trigger when ambient light drops beyond a certain level (or both), and you can also tweak the sensitivity of the sensor. In terms of range, they detect motion up to nine metres away and they have a 120° field of view.
Installation is a breeze, but there is some thought and work that goes into creating automatons and rules, and we cover some at the end of this post. If you have any motion-triggered automations you use, please leave them in the comments below. We’d love to try them out.
How to create an automation that triggers your lights to go on when motion is detected in a dark room, and then turns the lights off after five minutes when no motion is detected
We would like to thank Ghania from Eve’s support team for putting this automation together for us, which is a great way to only turn lights on when you enter a dark room and turn them off five minutes after leaving. We are using this automation in our living room in conjunction with our lamps that are connected to Eve Energy smart plugs and it works brilliantly.
In the Eve app:
- Open Eve > Automation > Scenes > Add Scene > Add Actions > Pick your Eve Energy > Power = ON > Add > Next > Name your Scene > Done.
- Switch to Rules > Add Rule > Next > Add Trigger > Motion > pick your Eve Motion > Motion Sensor = Motion > Add > Next > Add Value Condition > Pick Room with Eve Motion > Light Level Condition <= select your Lux value (5 is probably good, but you can set this in accordance with your needs*) > Add > Next > Select your Scene with Eve Energy.
*What is 1 lux you ask? A measurement of 1 lux is equal to the illumination of a one metre square that is one metre away from a single candle.
In Home app – set the duration:
- Open the Home App > Automation > Tap on your newly created rule and scroll down to the bottom of the page > Tap on Turn Off and set the value from Never to 5 minutes.
Product specs at a glance
- Field of view: 120°
- Distance: 9m max at 2m mounting height
- Operating temperature: -18°C to +55°C
- Indoors and outdoors: Certified IPX3
- Twilight setting: 0 – 15,000 lux