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Philips Hue Outdoor Motion Sensor - Works with Alexa

£94.5£189.00Clearance
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Don’t put your Hue Bridge and internet router directly next to each other. Yes, Hue provider a short Ethernet cable to link the two together – but it’s possible for the close distance between the two to cause signal interference (i.e. WiFi and ZigBee signals clashing with each other). If you can get a longer Ethernet cable to put some physical distance between the devices, that’s ideal. The higher up you place your Hue Bridge and motion sensor, the less chance there is of furniture and floor-level electrical devices interfering with the ZigBee signals. One thing I found really odd when I first started using Philips Hue’s light bulbs was that they update. I mean, light bulbs that have software updates – really?! But since they’re smart products, they update themselves – same as the Hue motion sensors does. You can adjust the motion sensors’ daylight sensitivity – motion sensors can detect how much daylight there is in the room (or outside) and will not trigger the lights when there is sufficient daylight. But if you'd like your lights to be triggered when there is more or even less sunlight in the room, you can adjust the daylight sensitivity in the app. You can adjust the motion sensors’ daylight sensitivity — motion sensors can detect how much daylight there is in the room (or outside) and will not trigger the lights when there is sufficient daylight. But if you'd like your lights to be triggered when there is more or even less sunlight in the room, you can adjust the daylight sensitivity in the app.

It’s quite a useful product – other than the fact that it can sometimes have issues and not work properly (or not work at all). Hence in the below sections, I cover the seven most common reasons why it might not be working properly – and how you can fix these issues. Cause #1: Software Updates The easiest way to test if this is the issue is the same as I cover earlier: move your Hue sensor to be in line-of-sight (and only a few yards/metres away) from the Hue Bridge. There may still be some quirks with those scene controls, though -- during one batch of tests at the CNET Smart Home, I set the front yard lights to turn on to an icy blue, "arctic aurora" scene whenever motion was detected. Instead, they turned on to the default soft white, even after multiple attempts. I tried switching the automation to a different scene -- the hot white "Energize" setting -- but still, the lights would turn on to a yellowy soft white. To test out whether this is the cause, try moving your Hue motion sensor close to your Hue Bridge – close enough that there’s a direct line of sight between the two. If the configured lights still don’t come on, try moving one of the configured light bulbs nearby too (again, a direct line of sight is best). If it then works, you have a ZigBee interference problem.ZigBee runs on the 2.4 GHz radio frequency: the same one as many WiFi signals, and also Bluetooth (and a whole load of other things, in-fact!). What this means is that ZigBee can be susceptible to interference, just like ‘dodgy WiFi’ can be. If this is happening, your Hue motion sensor might be detecting you just fine, but it either can’t send the ‘message’ to your Hue Bridge or the Hue Bridge can’t fully send the signals to turn your lightbulbs on. But the end result is the same: thinking that the Hue sensor itself is at fault! When setting up the motion sensors in the Philips Hue app, you’ll be able to program the lights for two timeslots: day and night. If you’d rather your motion sensor only be activated at night, you can program your lights to do nothing during the day. For each time slot, you can also program how long your lights will stay on after being triggered, ranging from one minute to an hour. If you discover that the motion sensor is turning lights on unnecessarily, you can adjust its sensitivity in the Hue app. The device also has a built-in light sensor that should prevent it from unnecessarily turning lights on during daylight hours (although the daylight behavior you program in the app might override that). A must-have accessory for Philips Hue users Fortunately, those steps are not difficult to figure out. The sensor can trigger multiple Philips Hue smart bulbs and luminaires at once, but its trigger is based on rooms, not individual fixtures. When you install Philips Hue bulbs or fixtures, the app has you assign those devices to “rooms.” When you configure the motion detector, the app allows you to select a maximum of three rooms in which all Hue bulbs assigned to those rooms can be controlled whenever motion is detected.

As with all Philips Hue devices, the outdoor motion sensor uses a ZigBee radio for command and control. As such, adding one will extend the range of your Philips Hue network, which might be particularly useful if you’re installing Hue products outside your home and you discover that the required Hue Bridge is having difficulty reaching them. You can install any combination of Philips Hue indoor sensors, outdoor sensors, and wireless switches, but you’re limited to 12 such devices on a single network. But what if you do still want it to trigger? After all, you might have your Hue motion sensor near your front door (where there’ll be light coming through the door glass), but you want it to turn lights on deeper into your house that don’t get as much daylight. The other devices near it (a NAS and network switch) aren’t routers or transmitters themselves, so they don’t have much change of interfering with the ZigBee signals. Cause #5: ZigBee Range Issues If it starts working okay, it’s a range issue. The easiest way of fixing this is to harness the ZigBee mesh and put a ‘ZigBee repeater’ between the Hue sensor and Hue bridge. If those words don’t make much sense to you, don’t worry: basically if you buy a cheap Philips Hue bulb (a white one is fine) and put it between the two devices, the Hue bulb will act as a relayer for the ZigBee signal and increase the overall range of your Hue motion sensor. One of the things that’s both good – and annoying! – about the Philips Hue motion sensor is that it has a dusk filter, also known as a daylight filter. What this means is that it might not trigger when there’s a lot of daylight around.The way this item works is that it has a PIR (passive infrared) sensor in the middle which detects infrared signatures (such as a person walking by) and it can be configured to turn your Philips Hue light bulbs on and off (or to different brightnesses and colors) as required. Related Reading: Philips Hue Motion Sensor Battery Guide: All You Need To Know Cause #4: ZigBee Interference Solving this can be frustrating and be a case of trial and error, but some key tips to remember are: What Hue adds to the equation is the ability to trigger up to 3 groups of lights at once, complete with in-app controls for how the lights should behave. Doing so is easy enough -- just tell the app what scene you'd like your lights to jump to whenever motion is detected, what scene they should return to once motion is stopped, and how long after motion stops before that happens.

When this happens, your motion sensor may simply be out of range and so it will appear “not to work” but this is actually caused by the motion sensor being unable to send a “motion triggered” message to the Hue Bridge. Following on from my point above about ZigBee interference, the other potential issue is when your Hue motion sensor is too far away from your Hue Bridge (or any other Hue bulbs – something I’ll discuss shortly). You can tell if this is ‘affecting’ your Hue motion sensor in the Hue app. If it says “Inactive” and “Sufficient daylight” under the device (accessible by going to Settings then Accessories in the Hue app), it’s intentionally ‘disabled’. But, of course, the battery will still run out. When it’s starting to fail, you may get sporadic motion triggers and eventually it’ll just stop triggering altogether. This is especially important for the Philips Hue Outdoor motion sensor which will have a shorter than normal range due to passing through your home’s external walls. Cause #6: A Reset May be Needed

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