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Thread: Zones in rooms ...

  1. #1
    Automated Home Legend chris_j_hunter's Avatar
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    Default Zones in rooms ...

    wondered if anyone had managed to get zones within a room working with individual presence tracking - as in large rooms / open-plan layouts ?

    are there any tricks that could help ?

    we need to do it, but can't see how to avoid sensor confusion ... it's looking like we'll have to use QBIs in each zone to provide for local variations / scene control / etc ...

  2. #2
    Automated Home Guru cliffwright's Avatar
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    Anyone any thoughts on this? I too have a large room that is effectively 2 distinct zones that I'd like the lighting to act independently.

    In my case - I have an L shaped kitchen where the 'kick' of the 'L' is a utility area (that i refer to as zone 2) that joins the main kitchen are (zone 1) via a large open archway (so no doors).

    I have the lighting in both zones switched separately (2 SLD's in Zone 1 & 1 SLD in zone2) and a PIR in each too.

    What's the best 'zoning' approach to take? I've currently set this up as 1 kitchen room on the plan - but should I have in fact set this up as 2 rooms connected via a permanently open door?

    Cheers

    Cliff

  3. #3
    Automated Home Legend Karam's Avatar
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    Yes if you want to zone into two rooms then you need to represent it as two rooms joined by an open door. Then the success of operation depends on locating your sensors appropriately. For example placing a sensor above what might be for example an archway between the two rooms and pointing into the utility will ensure that sensor only sees activity in the utility, whereas placing in the middle of the utility ceiling risks the lower part of the sensing cone extending into the kitchen part. Although perhaps a bit crude, you can narrow the sensor's field of view by judicious application of white paint to the sensor head ... I think emulsion is good enough or even 'tippex' type stuff.

    Other options include the use of different sensors for example an IR beam based door way sensor would give more accurate (or additional) transit information if a PIR couldn't be placed/occluded appropriately.

  4. #4
    Automated Home Sr Member
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    Hi Chris,

    As Karam suggested I divided one room into two zones by adding a room and an open door. To make things look nice I hid the "false room" so the plan looked like reality. The scheme worked well (until I decided that I didn't need to treat them as separate zones!)

    Peter

  5. #5
    Automated Home Legend chris_j_hunter's Avatar
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    we've just three internal doors still to install (this week, all being well), so we'll soon be giving our set-up a go ...

    a mix of reed-switched windows & internal & external doors, always-open virtual doors between zones, plus some reed-switched cupboard doors & draws, a handful of internal doors without reed-switches, and a good number of PLHs ...

    with the virtual doors very much in the majority ...

    before we started to install the real doors, we tried it with all virtual doors & PLHs - it did not work at all well ...

    OTOH, on a quick-look, in the areas where we now have a mix of reed-switched doors & PLHs, it seems to work v.well - so long as we open & close doors as we go ...

    main problem seems to be sensors picking-up movement in other zones ...

    the reed-switched doors seem to help a lot with resolving such conflicts ...

    when we've got all the doors in and (for some zones) our furniture, too, we expect a big improvement ...

    after that, we've a roll of masking tape, to help us explore some fine tuning ...

    so, finger's crossed ...

    not sure about the stairs - our landings are all used as useful spaces (window-seat in one, Node0 in another, hats & coats in another) - so would putting virtual doors top & bottom be helpful ?
    Last edited by chris_j_hunter; 16th October 2012 at 08:18 AM. Reason: last line or two had gone missing ...

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