“How Do I…?” Create a repeating Lighting Scene

It’s one thing to create a lighting scene and be able to execute it from a remote or touchscreen. Why not take it one step further and truly automate it?

Say you have some lights outside that you want to come on at sunset and then turn off at midnight every day. Well lets make it everyday easy.

First we need to create a lighting scene. If you are on 1.8 or below you will need to create 2 actually. One for turning the lights on and one for off. If you are on 2.0 and create a scene for turning the lights on, it will automatically create an off scene for programming purposes.

At the bottom left of composer you will want to select “agents”. At the top left select “lighting scenes”. Below this select “new”. I’m going to call mine “Outside Night Lights”.

Now I need to select the loads that I want to turn on for this scene. So with my newly named lighting scene hightlighted to the middle left, I select “Add/Remove Load” at the top middle. This will pop up a box that has every load in my project. I simply scroll thru it and put a check mark next to each light I want to include. Later on if I want to remove a load, I just go back to this spot and uncheck it, or hit the “remove load” button that will appear after I finish this part.

Now that I have selected the loads I want, I select the “ok” button. Now the middle display has all the loads I checked. If they are dimmers I can select how bright I want them and how fast they ramp. Once you have made the adjustments you want to make, and if you are on 2.0 make sure you hit the “sync this scene” button at the top right. This is what removes the popcorn effect (lights don’t come on or off at the same exact time)seen in previous versions.

As it stands now this scene can be executed on a touchscreen/remote/tv GUI. Lets take it a step further now. Go to agents on the bottom left and at the top left select “scheduler”. In the middle left select “new”. For consistency I’m going to call it “Outside Night lights On”. I’m going to have it occur at sunset and repeat daily by selecting the choices in the pop up box.

I’m going to also create another schedule to repeat daily at midnight called “Outside Night lights Off”.

Now we need to program these 2 schedules to execute our new lighting scene. At the bottom left go to programming. At the top left scroll all the way down to “scheduler” and then below that select the schedule we want to program. In this case “Outside Night Lights On”. Now on the top right scroll all the way down to “lighting scenes”. Since I’m on 2.0 you will see that I have 2 “Outside Night Lights” scenes. One with -ON to the right (which is the one I actually created earlier) and one with -OFF to the right(composer automatically creates this one). The OFF scene will turn any load off that is in the ON scene at the same ramp rate as in the ON scene.
Since we are turning the lights on, I will select the scene with -ON next to it and drag or double click the line of code above it to the middle. This is what it should look like.

I’m not showing it here, but I also went to the left and selected the “Outside Night Lights Off” scheduler and then on the right selected the “Outside Night Lights”-OFF scene. I double clicked this line of code into the middle.

Now I’m all set, at sunset my lighting scene will turn on and at midnight it will turn off. Just an FYI on how sunset/sunrise is determined for your system. If you select Monitoring at the bottom left and then at the top left select the very first item, usually your name, the middle pane will display a bunch of general info. It is the latitude and longitude section that determines what your sunset/sunrise time is NOT the timezone/clock below it.

hope you enjoyed
Pharmdsmith
Paul J. Smith
Need a dealer or have questions-email me at paul.smith@thesohoshop.com
or call me at 931-241-5670 and select my name in the directory

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