Just wanted to point you to a brilliant post on Reddit.com in which a user of Hue Essentials explains how to take advantage of your traditional switches. Based on time of day he explains how he sets scenes.
“TIP: Use traditional (dumb) switch to turn on a “Scene” based on the time of day. Faster and more reliable than Hue Lab’s “Time-based light”.”
Read all about it at this link on Reddit.com.
That’s really smart!
Is this possible with IKEA tradfri lights, as well? And if yes which bridge will I need, tradfri or hue Bridge?
This trick should work with any lights as long as they are connected to a Philips Hue bridge. It will not work on other bridges.
It would still be better to get a smart switch as you can configure much more and the light will not flash white for a few seconds when turning on.
Thank you for your reply.
Regarding Smart switch I have the IKEA controls. I guess if the bridge stops working I could control the lights still with them?
And Wlwould the tradfri switches prevent the white flash at the beginning and is this only a tradfri “bug” or do you have this with hue as well?
With the IKEA switch you can not set different colours based on time of day.
The white flash happens because the light goes to the default white state when turned on with a non smart switch. Because of the trick in this topic the color is overridden to another one within a few seconds. So you see a white flash.
If you would like the best solution: get a hue switch or friends of hue switch, and use that on a Philips Hue bridge. That way you can configure it how you like.
I’ll give it a try. I have to see how it works in reality. Thank you Thomas for your explenation
Basically I am looking for a better version of hue’s natural light feature. Is the here discribed poscedure still the best way to use traditional dumb switches to set scenes based on time of day today? Can one dimm the light in this feature without changing the brightness level for this time slot or the next permamently?
The problem with “natural light” and hue labs “time based light” seems to be, that after turning the dumb switch of and on later not the correct brightness and color for the then current time slot are chosen. But either default or the last time slot.
In this Reddit article you say that you could create this featur in a way not to overload the hue bridge. The goal is to run all rooms on the same time slot schedule with the same brithness und color temperature.
It seems this could be of interest:
Hue lights with conventional switches - Time-Based Light : Hue (reddit.com)