Turn lights on when arriving after sunset

It's very easy to configure your Nero smart home to turn the lights on whenever someone arrives home, changing the house mode from Away to Home, but often we only want to turn lights on when we are arriving when it is getting dark, such as after sunset.

Required components

You'll need a few components in your Nero smart home to be able to use this type of automation. Ensure that you have:

• My Nero installed on your mobile device with always-on Location Services allowed.
  • Ensure that each device with My Nero installed uses a unique username otherwise your gateway is likely to have problems identifying when you are and aren't home. Check out how to create a new user.
• The Reactor plugin installed on your Nero Gateway.
• At least one Nero device controlling a light.

Configure house modes for auto actions

Not sure what House Modes are? Take a look at this introductory article: configure your Nero's house modes.

This automation relies on the built-in geofencing functions of the house mode feature. Ensure that each My Nero login has a unique user, then ensure that House Modes is set to automatically change the mode between Home and Away.

You can also change how long the system counts down before changing the mode or starting to send notifications from armed sensors. In the exactly above we have reduced the Home to any other mode timeout to just 10 seconds and then we wait a further 20 seconds before we start sending notifications for tripped sensors. This is roughly equivalent to the Exit Delay feature of a home alarm system.

Ensure that all devices in the list shown for Home are set to "No Change". We will control what should change using a scene rather than this built-in function.

Create the automation

Create an automation that performs the actions you want to happen every time the house mode change to Home from Away.

• Trigger
  • Manual (we will use Reactor to start the automation running)
• Actions
  • All the devices you want to turn on, set to a level, or otherwise change the state of.

Install the Reactor plugin

Reactor is a community plugin for Nero that allows you to create extremely custom triggers and sensors. In this case we want to use Reactor to create a trigger when the house mode changes from Away to Home and it is between Sunset and Sunrise.

1. Go to Apps > Install Apps and install Reactor. Allow the process to completely finish, the install dialogue will let you know when it is safe to leave the page.

2. Once the app is installed, go to the Devices page. You should now see the Reactor control panel widget. If you don't, refresh the page to update your browser.
3. Open the Reactor widget and click the Add Sensor button. Once the processing finishes return to the Devices page and refresh your browser. It will have created a new widget called Reactor Sensor 1 that we can now configure with our rules.
4. Open the Reactor Sensor 1 device page. Set the name to something that makes sense, such as Night Arrival Sensor, and assign it to a room.
5. The first page shows an overview of the current state of the sensor. Go to Conditions in the grey bar to start setting some rules.

6. Create two rows in the Conditions (left green button at the bottom) and set the first to track the House Mode change and the second to track the time between Sunset and Sunrise.
   • We are using the House Mode changes from attribute rather than the House Mode is attribute to ensure that the automation only triggers when the first person arrives home, and not if other house mode types are being used (such as Night).
7. To ensure that both of these rules have to be met before starting a scene, click on the AND option in the top left. The text will become white to let you know it is active.
8. Click Save and then go to the Activities tab.
9. Select the scene you created under the option for when TRUE.

10. Click Save and then return to the Status tab.
    • This tab will now show you the current state of the rules you created. It will show a red X when the rule isn't true and a green checkmark when it is. The right-hand side will show you the current state of each line in the rules to help you troubleshoot.
    • The blue bar will show you the status of the overall rule and the rules type (in our case, AND).