Living room lights usually only know on and off

On an overcast afternoon a living room is already dim, but people hold out because it still feels like daytime. By the time it is obviously too dark to see, your eyes have been straining for a while.

The reverse happens just as often: the lights go on in the morning, the sun comes out at noon, and nobody remembers to switch them off. They stay on, pointlessly, all day.

The problem is that daylight is always changing while a lamp has one fixed brightness. With nothing connecting the two, you get alternating stretches of too dark and simply wasteful.

The right way to think about it is total brightness

What you actually care about is not how bright the lamp is but how bright the room is. Daylight plus artificial light is what your eyes experience. Since daylight varies, the artificial half should vary in the opposite direction and keep the sum steady.

One day in the room, hour by hour

Unfolding that chart into six moments makes it easier to see what the system is actually doing for you. The amber band is what comes in through the window; the blue band is what the lamps put back.

1. 06:40

   First light, lamps only half awake

   The sky outside is still grey-blue and daylight covers barely a fifth of the target. The lamps supply the rest, just enough to make out the floor and the coffee table. You sit down with a glass of water and nothing glares at you.

2. 09:30

   The sun arrives and the lamps step back

   Light climbs across the window and daylight reaches around three fifths. The lamps top up only the remaining slice, putting out far less than they did three hours ago, yet the brightness you perceive has not changed. You are across the room tidying and answering a few messages.

3. 13:00

   Peak daylight, almost every lamp off

   Daylight alone holds the target, and only the corner with its back to the window keeps a fitting lit. You read on the sofa for an entire afternoon without reaching for a single switch, and no part of the room feels dim.

4. 17:40

   Dusk falls faster than you expect

   Within half an hour daylight drops from half the target to a trace, the lamps take over most of the load, and the colour starts drifting warm. It is the steepest handover of the day, but because it is gradual all you notice is that the evening stopped looking grey.

5. 20:30

   All lamp now, but the target has come down

   Nothing is left outside, so every bit of brightness in the room is artificial. Since this period asks for under half the daytime level, the walls read warm, which suits a series or a conversation.

6. 23:10

   Late night, only enough to move by

   Brightness sits at its lowest step. You fetch water from the kitchen, close a door and walk back to the bedroom, seeing your feet and finding the handle without a wash of white light chasing away the sleepiness you just built up.

Six periods, six different targets

The total should not be fixed all day either. Waking up, working, and winding down are different requirements.

Four things it takes care of

Different rooms, different settings

What you need to have

How the whole thing works

Use the ready-made blueprint

The hub ships with 22 tested automation blueprints — think of one as a fill-in-the-blanks form. This uses adalight, designed exactly for "six periods a day, each with different light".

Just say the word

None of those fields needs filling in by hand. The WOOWTECH hub ships with HA-MCP, so AI can connect straight into your system, build the thing, and then go back and check the lights really follow the schedule.

Prompts you can copy straight out

Each block below can be copied whole with the button on the right. Pick the one closest to what you want — you do not need all of them.

Link the living room lights to the daylight.
Dim them when there is plenty of sun and bring them up as it gets dark.
After eight in the evening go warm and dim, and after ten leave only
a low background level.
Change the level gradually rather than in jumps.

Build daylight-linked lighting for the living room.
Use the ready-made blueprints, do not write a pile of custom rules.

Split the day into six periods, each with its own target total
brightness and colour temperature:
06:00-08:00 at 60% and 4000K, 08:00-12:00 at 85% and 5000K,
12:00-17:00 at 85% and 4500K, 17:00-20:00 at 70% and 3500K,
20:00-22:00 at 45% and 2700K, after 22:00 at 20% and 2200K.

If there is an illuminance sensor, set the lamps to the target minus
the daylight already in the room, not to the target itself.
If there is no sensor, build the time-only version and tell me so.

Keep the changes gentle: at most 10% per adjustment and at least
30 seconds between them, so a passing cloud produces a slow breath
rather than a flicker. Pause the rule while the television is playing
and resume when playback stops.

Once it is built, test it yourself, confirm it really works,
and then tell me which devices you used.

Our living room gets a lot of sun and barely needs a lamp at midday.
Drop the two daytime targets from 85% to 75%,
and let the lights switch off entirely when the daylight is enough
instead of holding them on to reach a number.
Put the illuminance sensor in the middle of the room facing up,
never directly under a fitting, or it reads the lamp as daylight
and keeps correcting itself.
Leave the four evening periods exactly as they are.

The 20:00 to 22:00 period is too dim — raise the target from 45% to 55%.
Make the period after 22:00 warmer still, 2000K instead of 2200K.
Also widen the per-step limit from 10% to 15%; it reacts too slowly for me.
Leave the other four periods alone.

The living room lights spent the whole afternoon swinging bright and dim, and I suspect
the lamps are shining onto the sensor, which then pulls them back the other way.
Let us prove it the crude way. Switch the daylight top-up off for one entire day tomorrow.
If the illuminance readings go flat, that is our answer.
At the end of that day, put the two days side by side for me, then tell me where
the sensor should move to, or how much slower the changes need to be.

Common questions