off timer for smart lighting, advice please

happyhero

Hi I have automated a fair bit of my lighting with smart switches which I also control with Alexa. 

The majority of my smart stuff is the Quinetic switches and they all work fine but I have kids who keep turning stuff on but never get round to turning things off and not all my lamps are LED yet, not that I wouldn't want them to be turned off too if someone wasn't in that particular room for hours.

 Anyway I thought it would be simple to find a app or function to do this and I have spent ages looking and found nothing. I basically want to be able to control them like those old fashioned staircase lights you get where you press a button in and it pops out and the lights go off after a set time.

 So I would set a time depending where that light is ie 20 minutes or an hour depending on the best for that area and they would then go off automatically.

 It would be particularly useful for the staircase because they are always left on. My daughter will often turn the staircase lights on, walk up the stairs and close her door and they will stay on for 3 hours or more before she re-emerges again.

 Any advic help appreciated.

mexican_dave

Sorry I am a bit analogue, so can't recommend an App, but can confirm it's possible for an electrician to set you up with a timer system to control the stair lights, similar to how you described.
As this is a money saving web-site I suggest the far cheaper option is to buy an LED bulb for this stairway costing you about £4.

happyhero

An App or an Alexa skill would cost even less. I am more interested in getting this simple function working, I mean how hard can it be for a smart app turning lights off on a timer?

FreeBear

happyhero said:

An App or an Alexa skill would cost even less. I am more interested in getting this simple function working, I mean how hard can it be for a smart app turning lights off on a timer?

An app (running on a phone) would require the phone to be on at all times. If you have a wifi module with the Quinetic switches, you might be able to integrate it with IFTTT or SmartThings. Scrub that, it looks like the switches will work with Tuya SmartLife (via the wifi hub). However, this commits you to relying on the internet and a remote server being up 24/7 for as long as you have the switches installed.

My preferred option is to use Home Assistant to handle all the automations - Run it on a Raspberry Pi, and you can keep everything in-house and don't have to worry about the internet or a remote server going down. Looks like there might be some code out there running on an ESP32 & a 433MHz receiver/transmitter module so you don't need a Quinetic wifi hub.

Ectophile

The cheapest "fix" would probably be low energy LED lamps. You could use lamps rated 4W or less, which is almost nothing, and doesn't require any fancy switches running 24 hours a day to operate them.

coffeehound

Not the cheapest but perhaps the cleanest might be replacing the light switches with the new version of the old pneumatic timer switches

https://www.screwfix.com/p/elkay-3875a-1-push-button-3-wire-master-timer/34572

or replace light switches with occupancy sensor(s)

https://cpc.farnell.com/pro-elec/0901s/switch-pir-switched/dp/PL11072  

You can even buy bulbs with the occupancy sensor built in if the light is within 'sight' of the approaching person

Gunner276

You could set up seperate routines in Alexa to switch off all lights every hour or 30 minutes.

Although would be annoying if you turn a light on at 7:59 and it turns off at 8!