Lighting¶

Current State¶

Most of the house uses standard manual switches today. Smart switches are being installed in phases — starting with the outdoor/exterior locations.

The Full Lighting Schedule¶

Every light that runs on its own is listed here in one place — when it changes, why, and how it decides. The deep-dive on each light is further down this page; this is the at-a-glance master schedule.

Two kinds of light live here:

• Scheduled lights change at fixed moments — a clock time, or a sun event (sunset / civil dusk / civil dawn).
• Smart lights don't follow a clock at all. They re-decide whenever something changes (you walk past, you go to bed, a leak trips, the sun moves) by running down a priority list — the first rule that matches wins. Those are the night lights, the sitting lamp, and the two Govee ambiance lamps.

A day in the life¶

Reading top to bottom, this is roughly what the house's lights do over a full day and night:

Every light — when, why, how¶

What overrides what¶

• Routines beat schedules. Good Night turns everything off no matter where the day-arc is; Good Morning hands every smart lamp back to automatic. We Are Leaving kills the interior lights but deliberately leaves the exterior schedulers running.
• Safety beats ambiance. A water leak or a triggered alarm overrides the ambiance lamps and the night lights' normal look — that's when a silent, can't-miss signal matters most. Only standing there in manual mode outranks a safety alert on the Govee lamps.
• The two Govee lamps are ambiance only; the two Sengled bulbs are the data lights. Anything you need to read (electricity price, SOFI) lives on a dedicated bulb, never on the mood lamps. See Ambiance Lamps below.
• Presence trumps the schedule in the office. When the office is empty, every office light is held off regardless of what the schedule wants — see Office Presence below.

Office Presence¶

Presence sensors watch Louis' Office and turn the whole room's lighting into a "follow me" system. Because the room has an odd layout, more than one sensor covers it — two Aqara FP300s (mmWave — they sense you even sitting perfectly still, unlike a plain motion detector) as the primaries, plus a short "kick" off the Ecobee thermostat. The office counts as occupied if any of them sees you (and only goes "empty" once they've all been clear for a minute), so a spot one sensor misses is caught by another. Adding another sensor later is a one-line change. The rule is simple:

"Restore exactly how you left them" is the important part — it remembers state:

• If a light was off when you left, it stays off when you return.
• If a light was on, it comes back on.

So the room doesn't blast every light on the moment you walk in — it brings back the scene you had. The two Govee mood lamps (Corner + Office) simply pick their normal automatic scene back up; the plain lights return to their exact previous on/off state.

Night Lights¶

Eight smart night lights (ThirdReality) are placed around the house. Each one senses motion and room brightness, and they manage themselves — no switches to touch. They're tunable-white and color, which lets them double as quiet status indicators.

What they do on their own:

They also signal things at a glance, after dark:

• 🔵 Whole set blue — a water leak has been detected somewhere. Blue reads as water and keeps it distinct from an alarm (which turns the set red). A silent, can't-miss whole-house alert that works even if a phone is on Do-Not-Disturb. (You'll still get the push notification too.)
• 🔴 Just the bedroom light red — Good Night didn't fully complete (e.g. a garage door didn't close). It stays red until you fix it — the moment you do (close the garage), it goes back to its normal glow on its own — or until Good Morning (see the routines below).
• 🟠 Amber — a garage door is open. The whole set glows amber until both doors close.

Priority is leak (whole-set blue) → Good Night error (bedroom red) → garage open (amber) → normal, so a leak always wins.

Master Bedroom Sitting Lamp¶

The wall lamp in the master bedroom's sitting area is now a Philips Hue bulb that manages itself, in a similar spirit to the night lights above — but because it's a colour-temperature bulb, when it turns on it picks a warmth and brightness that tracks the sun (warm and dim at night, cooler and brighter around midday) instead of just flicking on:

Turning it on yourself (reading light). Normally the lamp only comes on when it's dark, so it won't help if you want extra light on a bright afternoon. Say "Alexa, turn on the sitting room lamp" (or flip the Sitting Room Lamp switch) to force it on anyway — it uses the same sun-tracking warmth (bright and neutral in the daytime). It switches itself back to automatic when the room's been empty a couple of minutes, or when you say "turn it off". In the evening "off" hands back to automatic, which may light it again for ambiance.

"Dark" means either the sun is down or the room's own light sensor reads dark (that's what catches a storm mid-day). The evening-ambiance and wake-up behaviors are timed apart on purpose: the lamp won't re-light itself at 5 AM just because someone's still in bed — it only comes on for the evening between 4 PM and 2 AM, and separately on wake if you're up before sunrise. You can tune how dark the room has to get before it kicks in from the dashboard. A manual change (Apple Home or the app) is respected until the next thing changes (dark falls, someone leaves, a movie starts, etc.).

Exterior Lights¶

All the outdoor lights run themselves from one system, keyed to how far the sun is below the horizon. That point is adjustable — the Exterior Lights Dark Threshold setting, which defaults to 0° (sunset). Lower it toward −6° to hold the lights back until it's properly dark; raise it above 0° to bring them on before the sun has fully set. Both the evening on and the morning off use the same number, so the rule is simply "on whenever the sun is below that angle." There are two groups:

• "When you go to bed" means Good Night has run (your phone's on the charger and you're in the bedroom). Once you've turned in, the backyard lights stay off for the rest of the night — they won't flick back on if you get up at 3 AM — and come back the next evening at dusk.
• The system re-checks every 30 minutes, so if a switch briefly drops offline it fixes itself instead of getting stuck.
• Any light you add to a front / side / backyard area later is picked up automatically — no setup.

New outdoor lights are being added area by area, so the "front & side" group grows as the exterior smart switches roll out.

Turning them on or off yourself¶

Three voice switches let you override the schedule by hand — say it to Alexa, or tap the toggle on the dashboard's Lights tab:

Your choice sticks until the next dusk or dawn. When you flip one of these, the automatic schedule steps aside so the lights stay how you set them — no more getting overridden a few minutes later. At the next civil dusk or dawn (or the next morning), the normal schedule takes back over. So "turn the outside lights off" at 9 PM keeps them off for the night; "turn the backyard lights on" during the day keeps them on until dusk hands control back.

(This replaced the old "Outdoor Lights On" / "Outdoor Lights Off" Alexa scenes, which you could only "activate" and which the schedule reclaimed within half an hour.)

The interior foyer light is also on Alexa now — "Alexa, turn the foyer light on / off."

Good Morning & Good Night¶

Two one-tap routines (dashboard buttons and "Alexa, good morning / good night") that also run automatically.

Good Morning ☀️¶

Runs when your phone comes off the charger after 6 AM and you then walk into the kitchen — at which point the kitchen Echo Show greets you with a short spoken briefing:

"Good morning. It is 72 degrees and partly cloudy, with a high near 85. Your sleep score was 97. SoFi closed at 17 dollars and 30 cents, down 0.1 percent. In premarket, SoFi is up 0.4 percent. Energy cost yesterday was 5 dollars and 60 cents."

It also wakes the house up: clears sleep mode (night lights return to normal), turns on the office price bulb, and hands the Corner Lamp back to its automatic scenes (see below) — even if you'd left it in manual control the night before. The briefing is designed not to wake Lindsay — it only speaks once you're in the kitchen, never the bedroom.

Good Night 🌙¶

Runs when you're actually in bed — the bedroom thermostat senses you're there and your phone is on the charger (after 10 PM). A quick top-up charge while you're watching TV won't trigger it. It:

• Turns all the lights off — including the back-yard string lights, salt lamp, and ramen sign.
• Closes both garage doors, then double-checks 30 seconds later.
• Drops the night lights to their overnight ember glow.
• Sends a quiet bedtime report to your phone ("All secure," or a heads-up about anything still on).

If something didn't complete — say a garage door refused to close — the bedroom night light turns red so you know from bed. Go fix it and it returns to normal on its own; otherwise it clears at Good Morning. (TVs and music are left alone — other people may still be up.)

Ambiance Lamps — Corner Lamp & Office Lamp¶

Two Govee lamps in the office run themselves as a matched pair: the Corner Lamp (the tall 16-segment RGBIC lamp) and the Office Lamp (a 3-head fixture, each head washing a soft circle of light on the wall). They're twins — one tuned to the same rhythm, so they always look coordinated even though they're different physical lamps. You can still take either one over by hand any time.

How the ambiance lamps work¶

Both lamps run through the same list of checks, top to bottom — whichever one matches first wins, and everything below it is ignored. This is the order to check if a lamp is ever doing something you don't expect:

flowchart TD
    Start(["Re-checking the lamp\n(something just changed)"]) --> Manual{"Manual mode\nturned on?"}
    Manual -- "yes" --> M["Leave it alone —\nyou're free-painting it\nin the Govee app"]
    Manual -- "no" --> Alarm{"Alarm\ntriggered?"}
    Alarm -- "yes" --> A["🔴 Red alert scene"]
    Alarm -- "no" --> Leak{"Water leak\ndetected?"}
    Leak -- "yes" --> L["🔴 Red alert scene"]
    Leak -- "no" --> Movie{"Dark out, and a\nmovie's playing on the\noffice Apple TV?"}
    Movie -- "yes" --> Off1["Off"]
    Movie -- "no" --> Away{"Louis away\nfrom home?"}
    Away -- "yes" --> Off2["Off"]
    Away -- "no" --> Asleep{"Asleep?\n(Good Night ran)"}
    Asleep -- "yes" --> Off3["Off"]
    Asleep -- "no" --> Storm{"Genuine storm outside?\n(lightning / hail /\nheavy pouring rain)"}
    Storm -- "yes" --> S["⛈️ Storm scene"]
    Storm -- "no" --> Amb["🌅 Sun-phase\nambiance scene"]

A few things worth calling out:

• Safety beats everything except manual. An alarm or a leak lights the lamp red even during a movie or while you're away — that's exactly when a silent, can't-miss signal matters most. Manual mode is the only thing that outranks a safety alert, since it means you're standing right there painting the lamp yourself. A leak or alarm outranking manual would just be confusing.
• A storm never interrupts a movie or an empty/sleeping house. Weather sits near the bottom — below the off-gates — on purpose, so a passing thunderstorm doesn't flash the lamp on while you're watching TV in the dark or nobody's home. Only a genuine storm counts — lightning, hail, or heavy pouring rain. Ordinary rain, snow, or fog is ignored entirely; the weather feed used to over-call "rainy" when it was really just cloudy out, so the lamps only react to real storms now.
• On at wake, off at sleep just falls out of the list. There's no dedicated "turn on at 7am" rule — Good Night marks the house asleep (which the "asleep" check catches, turning the lamp off), and Good Morning clears that flag, so the very next check re-runs the list and lands back on the ambiance scene.

One shared schedule, two lamps — and it follows the sun¶

Both lamps read the same schedule and the same weather check, so tuning one place tunes both lamps at once — you'll never update "the schedule" twice. And that schedule isn't a fixed clock: it's driven by the sun's actual position in the sky. Instead of "it's 5 PM, show twilight," it's "the sun is grazing the horizon right now, so glow gold."

Two things fall out of that, and they're what make it feel alive:

• Real golden hour and blue hour. The lamps hit the warm golden hour (sun just above the horizon) and the cool blue hour (sun just below) at the actual moment they happen outside.
• It shifts with the seasons on its own. Golden hour lands near 8:30 PM in July and 4:30 PM in December — the lamps simply follow the sun, so the whole day-arc self-adjusts all year with no re-tuning.

flowchart LR
    TOD["☀️ Sun-position schedule\n(dawn → sunrise → morning → midday →\ngolden hour → sunset → dusk → night)"]
    SEV["⛈️ Severe-weather check\n(real storms only)"]
    CR["Corner Lamp"]
    OR["Office Lamp\n(3 heads)"]
    CS["Corner Lamp's own\nscene picks"]
    OS["Office Lamp's own\nscene picks"]

    TOD --> CR
    TOD --> OR
    SEV --> CR
    SEV --> OR
    CR --> CS
    OR --> OS

Each lamp still picks its own scenes — a corner floor lamp and a 3-head wall washer don't have identical scene libraries — but the when (where the sun is, whether it's storming) is one shared decision both lamps agree on. (Under the hood: a single sensor.ambiance_scene reads the sun's elevation and whether it's rising or setting, and lands on one of ten sky phases.)

Ambiance vs. data — the guiding idea¶

The office now has four "smart" lights, split cleanly into two jobs:

flowchart LR
    subgraph Ambiance["✨ Ambiance — mood, not information"]
        Corner["Corner Lamp"]
        Office["Office Lamp (3 heads)"]
    end
    subgraph Data["📟 Data — glance-and-read"]
        TOU["TOU Price Bulb\n(electricity rate tier)"]
        SOFI["SOFI Ticker Bulb\n(stock price)"]
    end

The two Govee lamps are pure mood lighting — soft, animated, coordinated, and never something you need to "read." The two small Sengled bulbs are the opposite — plain on/off color coding you check at a glance for a specific fact (today's electricity price tier, or how SOFI is doing). Keeping the split clean means the nice lamps never get cluttered with a ticker, and the data bulbs never need to look pretty.

Corner Lamp (H607C)¶

What it shows, through the day — driven by where the sun actually is, so it tracks the real sky and shifts with the seasons (shown when nothing above it in the priority list applies):

Because it's sun-driven, the same phase happens at very different clock times across the year — that's the point. A genuine storm (lightning, hail, or heavy pouring rain) swaps in a dramatic Thunderstorm scene instead. An alarm shows a Breathe scene; a water leak shows a Dripping scene — both deliberately not red-strobe-alarming, just clearly different from the everyday ambiance.

Taking manual control:

Flip the Corner Lamp Manual toggle on the dashboard (or hit the manual-on webhook below), then pick any color, brightness, or scene you like in the Govee app — the automatic scenes stand down and leave the lamp alone until you hand it back. It returns to automatic either when you flip the toggle back (or hit the auto webhook), or automatically the next time Good Morning runs — so it can never get stuck in manual overnight.

Handy for a phone Shortcut or a physical button — a plain GET or POST to either URL does it, no body needed.

Office Lamp (3-head)¶

The newer 3-head office lamp washes light onto the wall from three separate heads, always shown together as one look — whatever scene the lamp picks, all three heads change together. It's the Corner Lamp's twin: same sun-phase arc, same storm/alarm/leak alerts, same off-when-asleep/ away/movie behavior — just its own matching set of scenes on different hardware (its bulbs are a different Govee model with a smaller scene library, so some phases use the nearest-fitting look):

A genuine storm shows Aurora; an alarm shows Fire; a water leak shows River.

Taking manual control works exactly the same way as the Corner Lamp — a dashboard toggle (or webhook) hands it over to the Govee app, and it auto-returns to automatic at the next Good Morning:

SOFI Ticker Bulb¶

A Sengled bulb in the office ("SOFI Ticker") shows how the SOFI stock is doing, at a glance, during market hours (9:30 AM–4 PM ET, weekdays):

• 🟢 Green when the stock is up on the day — a pale sage green for a small gain, deepening to a vivid pure green the more it's up.
• 🔴 Red when it's down — a soft dusty rose for a small dip, deepening to a vivid pure red the more it's down.
• 🟡 Amber when the day is basically flat (less than 0.1% either way).
• Off outside market hours.

The bulb stays the same brightness all day — it's the richness of the colour, not how bright it is, that tells you how big the move is. (Before July 2026 it was the other way round, which made small moves almost invisible.)

Because brightness no longer means anything, it's yours to set: SOFI Ticker Brightness (default 55%) controls how present the bulb is in the office. Turn it down if it's distracting — the colour still tells you everything. Changes apply straight away.

Color intensity maxes out around a ±4% day. The price comes from a free Yahoo Finance feed, refreshed every few minutes (so it's near-live, not to-the-second).

Outdoor Smart Switches — Coming First¶

The exterior lighting circuits are the first batch of the Inovelli Blue Series Zigbee smart switch rollout — the hardware is in hand and ready to install. Once installed, these behave exactly like normal switches (press the paddle to toggle) but also respond to voice and app control. The circuits below are the planned outdoor locations:

Controlling Outdoor Lights (once installed)¶

• Manual: Press the switch paddle like normal
• Alexa: "Alexa, turn on the [name]"
• Apple Home: Available in the Home app
• Dashboard: Accessible from the HA dashboard

What's Coming — Whole-House Rollout¶

Smart switches are being installed throughout the entire house in batches. After outdoor, the install order is:

1. Master Bedroom can lights
2. Office (can lights, corridor, fan)
3. Master Bedroom (fan, bathroom hallway, switched outlet)
4. Family Room (can lights, fan, switched outlet)
5. Kitchen + Laundry
6. Foyer + Dining Room
7. Lindsay's Office
8. Upstairs Hallway, 3rd Floor Stairs, Front Room

Each batch is ordered and installed before the next is ordered, so the rollout is steady but not rushed.

Fan locations (Office fan, Master Bedroom fan, Family Room fan) use a dedicated Inovelli fan+light switch that provides separate control of the fan speed and light — replacing the existing pull-chain or single-switch setup.

Technical Reference — Full Location Inventory¶