Smart home automation recipes and local sensing chains — HearthNodes
HearthNodes publishes working smart-home automation recipes: trigger, conditions, actions, hardware and the exact YAML. Filter by protocol, follow the topology, copy the recipe.
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matter
thread
zigbee
zwave
wifi
Presence
Presence and geofence
Bedtime taper: the house dims itself as rooms empty
Instead of a fixed bedtime scene, the house watches which rooms still have someone in them and lowers the rest of the lighting one step every 10 minutes, so the last person standing walks to bed through a house that is already dark.
zigbee
600000 ms
Guest mode: local recording only, cameras pause in private rooms
One boolean flips the house into guest mode: indoor cameras stop recording and physically close their privacy shutters, cloud uploads pause, and the hallway still lights on presence. Mode exits automatically 6 hours after the last guest device leaves Wi-Fi.
wifi
2200 ms
Departure standby sweep with a 12-device check list
When the last person leaves, a 45-second sweep walks a fixed list of twelve devices, turns off what should be off, and refuses to touch the freezer, the router or the server shelf. Reports back one summary notification instead of twelve.
zigbee
45000 ms
Room-following light that tracks you along the corridor
Three Thread presence sensors hand a single 20 % light level from zone to zone so the corridor is lit 2 m ahead of you and 4 m behind, without ever lighting the whole run at once. Measured handoff latency 600 ms.
thread
600 ms
Arrival warm-light handoff on the hall mmWave
A 60 GHz mmWave sensor in the entry hall turns on a 2400 K two-fixture scene the moment you step in, holds it for 12 minutes, and refuses to fire in daylight. Total detect-to-light latency measured at 850 ms.
matter
850 ms
Light
Light and daylight
Dark-room occupancy boost for a windowless utility room
A windowless utility room has no daylight reference at all, so presence alone drives a two-stage scene: 40 % on entry, 85 % when you stay past 20 seconds, off 90 seconds after you leave. Entry-to-light latency is 400 ms on Thread.
thread
400 ms
Overcast compensation for a north-facing kitchen
A kitchen with no direct sun still swings from 120 lx to 900 lx as cloud cover changes. This recipe tops up the under-cabinet strip to keep the counter at 350 lx while the ceiling stays off all day.
zigbee
5000 ms
Daylight harvesting: electric light follows the window
The ceiling circuit in a south-facing office trims itself down as daylight rises, holding a constant 500 lx on the work plane. Measured saving on a clear spring day was 41 % of the lighting energy against a fixed-100 % baseline.
matter
8000 ms
Twilight path lighting keyed to sun elevation, not a clock
Garden path lights come on when the sun hits -4° elevation and dim to 30 % at -12°, so the transition takes 25–40 minutes depending on the season and never looks like a switch was thrown.
zwave
30000 ms
Lux-adaptive blinds that hold 300 lx on the desk, not a fixed percentage
A closed-loop controller reads a desk lux sensor every 90 seconds and moves the blind to the position that keeps the desk between 250 and 400 lx. On an overcast day it opens fully; on a bright February noon it sits at 22 % open.
matter
90000 ms
Climate
Climate and air
Pollen lockout that closes windows before the count spikes
Using a local pollen sensor plus a 3-hour forecast, the automation closes windows 40 minutes before a predicted spike and hands ventilation to the HEPA supply unit, then reopens when the outdoor count falls below 20 grains/m³ for 30 minutes.
wifi
2400000 ms
Radiator-by-radiator balancing from room temperature curves
Thermostatic valves on seven radiators learn each room's heating curve over two weeks, then trim the valve position to hold ±0.4 °C instead of ±1.6 °C, which cut gas use by 12 % in a leaky 1970s flat.
zwave
1200000 ms
Whole-flat CO₂ purge with a 9-minute cross-ventilation window
Four CO₂ sensors across the flat trigger a 9-minute cross-ventilation on the two opposite windows when the mean reading passes 1 100 ppm, then re-check and repeat up to three times. Air changes measured at 4.1 ACH during the open phase.
thread
540000 ms
Night cooling purge that pulls in cool air only when it helps
On summer nights the bedroom window opens automatically only when outdoor air is at least 3 °C cooler than indoors and indoor CO₂ is above 900 ppm, closing at 05:30 or when outdoor temperature rises within 1.5 °C of indoor.
matter
180000 ms
Bathroom fan that runs until the humidity gradient flattens
The fan does not run for a fixed 20 minutes. It runs until the absolute humidity stops falling, which is typically 11 minutes after a 4-minute shower and 26 minutes after a bath — a 38 % reduction in fan runtime over a timed schedule.
zigbee
2000 ms
Energy
Energy and load
Storm reserve: pre-charge the battery and shed discretionary loads
When a wind warning or a grid-frequency excursion is detected, the battery is charged to 95 %, discretionary loads are shed, and the reserve floor is raised from 20 % to 60 % so a 6-hour outage does not leave the house dark.
matter
300000 ms
EV charging that yields to the oven without stranding the car
The charger modulates from 6 A to 16 A to hold total house load under the 63 A main fuse, pausing rather than stopping when the oven or dryer starts, and guarantees 40 % charge by 07:00 whatever the household does.
wifi
15000 ms
Dishwasher deferral to the cheapest two-hour tariff window
Instead of a fixed overnight start, the dishwasher is held until the cheapest two-hour block of the next 14 hours, calculated from the day-ahead prices. Average saving measured over a quarter: 31 % on that appliance's energy cost.
zigbee
50400000 ms
Divert solar surplus to the hot water cylinder instead of exporting at 4 ¢
The immersion heater steps up in 400 W increments to absorb PV surplus, holding grid import between -50 W and +150 W for four hours. In a 4.2 kWp array this captured 6.8 kWh on a clear April day instead of exporting it at the feed-in rate.
matter
60000 ms
Nightly phantom-load audit that finds the 38 W you forgot about
At 03:00 the house is quiet, so the automation reads every metering plug and ranks standby draw. A first run found 38 W of permanent load — 333 kWh a year — from a games console, a printer and an old set-top box.
zigbee
60000 ms
Water
Water and leak
Rainwater tank top-up and pump protection on a level probe
A pressure-based level probe keeps the 3 000 L rainwater tank between 40 % and 85 %, tops up from mains only during the cheap night window, and cuts the pump below 15 % so it never runs dry and burns its seal.
wifi
3600000 ms
Pipe-freeze guard: trickle the far tap and warn before the line drops to 2 °C
A pipe-clamp temperature sensor on the most exposed run warns at 4 °C and opens a 0.4 L/min trickle at 2 °C, which is enough to keep a 15 mm copper line flowing through a -8 °C night without wasting more than 12 litres.
thread
120000 ms
Irrigation that skips a zone when the soil is already wet
Six soil-moisture probes veto each zone's scheduled run. Over one summer the controller skipped 34 % of scheduled cycles and cut water use by 41 m³ without any visible plant stress on the tomatoes or the hedge line.
zigbee
1800000 ms
Leak-triggered main shutoff with a 4 litre flow threshold
Six leak pucks plus a whole-house flow meter close the main valve when any puck gets wet, or when flow exceeds 4 L/min for 12 minutes with no fixture in use. Measured shutoff time from water contact to closed valve: 9 seconds.
zwave
9000 ms
Safety
Access and safety
Package watch: porch event to a 40-second clip, no continuous recording
The porch camera records only when the mailbox or porch contact opens, producing a 40-second clip with a 10-second pre-roll, and pushes a still to the household. Between events the camera is in a low-power state with no stream and no cloud session.
wifi
3000 ms
Door left open: timed escalation instead of an instant alarm
A door left open escalates in three stages — a soft chime at 90 seconds, a spoken reminder at 5 minutes, a repeated alert at 15 minutes — because a fridge run should not sound like a burglary.
matter
90000 ms
Smoke and CO alarm: egress lighting, unlock, and silencing the HVAC
When any interconnected alarm sounds, the house lights the egress path to 100 %, unlocks the front door, opens the garage, stops the HVAC fan and silences the boiler — in that order, all within 4 seconds, and independently of any cloud service.
zwave
4000 ms