How to Automate Your Holiday Lighting

By David Powell

The holiday seasons are approaching fast and what better way to celebrate than to decorate with lights. There are several Z-Wave products on the market today that will make automating your fall and winter festive decorations a piece of cake.

Controllers
First you are going to need a controller. This can be either a USB controller coupled with software or a hardware controller such as a handheld, tabletop, or even more elaborate an Elk M1 Gold System. They each provide a different level of logic control. A handheld or table top controller could be programmed to simply turn the lights on and off at a scheduled time or at sunrise and sunset while the software and Elk M1 Gold controllers allow more sophisticated logic to be performed, which can be used for synchronized light animation. This article is not about the various controllers but I would be more than happy to answer any questions you have on our Forums.

Figure 1: Outdoor plug-in module

Devices
Most of your lights will be displayed outdoors, which means you need devices suited for that type of environment. One of my favorite Z-Wave enabled devices for holiday decorations is the Intermatic HomeSettings Outdoor Plug-In Module (see figure 1). These come in handy when you need to temporarily plug multiple strands of lights on separately controlled circuits (such as when you want to animate the decorations).

Figure 2: PIR

Another device you may not normally think about using with your decorations is a Z-Wave Wireless Motion Sensor (see figure 2). You could use this device to trigger another Z-Wave device such as the above Outdoor Plug-In Module or an In-Wall Receptacle. Imagine the look on the face of your "trick or treating" guest as they walk up to your dark home and a scary ghoul face lights up behind your window.

Figure 3: Receptacle and six-plugger

What am I doing?
Currently I am keeping it simple. I am using an InTouch Z-Wave Receptacle (see figure 3) and a "six-plugger" GFCI protected strip rated for outdoor use. I recently installed the receptacle outdoors, which is what sparked the idea for this article, and got me thinking of what I could do for the winter holidays. I am using ControlThink's ThinkEssentials 2.0 software along with an Intermatic USB Stick as my controller. I have programmed ThinkEssentials to turn the lights on at sunrise and off at sunset. Hey, it's a start.

David Powell is ZWaveWorld's contributing editor.

Check ZWaveWorld.com for future "How-to" articles on automating your home.

A frequent contributor to cocoontech.com, David Powell holds a B.A. in computers and information science from University of Maryland. He started his home automation project with a HomeSeer to automate his Z-Wave lighting and has since grown his system into 25+ Z-Wave devices controlled by the CQC software. He holds a Home Automation license, which qualifies him to install Z-Wave devices in residential structures.