Smart Lighting Controller + Home Assistant

[azdavidr]

I had some time to install the new Rachio Smart Lighting Controller this weekend. My previous setup was a standard non-smart Unique transformer with no dimming. I had it powered through an outdoor Z-Wave switch so that the lights turned on at 100% at sunset, and turned off at our normal bedtime, as my wife didn’t like the light bleeding through the windows in our bedroom. Fair enough.

With the Rachio controller and the associated 3-zone control and dimming options, I can now break things up a bit. At sunset I still have all 3 zones turn on.

As bedtime approaches I now turn off the a good portion of the lighting, and dim the zone close to the house to 10%. It’s hard to see the dimming effect as my camera is trying to compensate for the darkness.

And a bit later I keep just the trees on near the back of the yard, away from the house.

I think all of this could have been done with schedules within the Rachio app., but I decided to integrate it into Home Assistant (HA) so I can integrate it into my HA dashboard, since I use the HA app. for the rest of my smart home control. Aside from that, I can now do things like turn on some zones if my yard’s Ring floodlight cameras detect motion, or turn on landscape lights if I open my back patio door.

I have another HA automation that turns on the landscape lighting if our home alarm is triggered, which will happen if our back yard gate is opened at night.

Install and setup was a piece of cake. Getting the Rachio unit installed was very straightforward, and the connection to HA was easily accomplished through HA’s Matter integration.

By far the most amount of time I spent on this project was figuring out how to break up my previous single-zone yard into three-zones, but that’s yard specific. If I had done a 1-for-1 swap of the old transformer it would’ve been a 1-2 hour job.

My only concern is that my old transformer housing was all-metal, which holds up fine in our brutal desert summers. This unit housing is not metal. It does seem resilient, but time will tell as it gets beat on with our strong sun exposure.

[tmcgahey]

Obviously, each of those lighting groups that you are changing at different times are set up as zones and on different runs of wires, correct?

[azdavidr]

Correct. That was the hard part of the install in my case. The wiring per zone wasn’t separated at my old transformer, but it turned out that somewhere underground the installers had run 3 independent sets of wires. I had to find the separate wires underground, running between the old transformer and the lights they fed, so I could tap in with the new transformer.

[tmcgahey]

With our new backyard landscape lighting we are in the middle of, we have MULTIPLE runs, but the runs are just to complete areas. I kind of wish we would have planned to pick up a few lights in each area on a run so that I could do similar. Unfortunately, this system is requiring a 900 watt transformer, so the Rachio won’t cut it, unless I tried to run 3, which I suppose is possible.

[azdavidr]

@tmcgahey

I kind of wish we would have planned to pick up a few lights in each area on a run so that I could do similar.

Too late ? Last minute changes are painful, but once it’s buried and the soil dries and settles to concrete-like levels it’s soooo painful to change anything. My neighbors might have heard a curse word or two this weekend.

[tmcgahey]

Yes, wires are buried, fixtures are wire up…

[Thomas_Lerman]

When I was laying out the sprinklers, I ran low voltage wiring as lighting zones even though that option did not seem to exist (except for one, rather expensive option). Figured it might by the time I put in lights. I ended up “Frankensteining” my own controller that had issues mostly with it periodically shutting down (one big part was for some reason I put a GFCI pigtail on a GFCI which was a big cause of issues that I had. It still seemed to lose connection periodically after that. I would still like to add more lights (wishing the good lights were cheaper) and zones. I have loamy sand, which it is pretty easy to dig almost anywhere.

[tmcgahey]

The “good” thing about the lighting system I have is that it connects via a private BT network once you set it up, and I can place each individual light into a “group” that functions much like a zone regardless of where it is in the yard, or what line it is connected to. Since I don’t fully have the system up and running yet, I haven’t had a chance to play with the app much, but the only downfall is that I don’t believe I can set schedules based on these “groups”. I can change the RGBW color, dim, on/off, but I don’t recall seeing the ability to schedule.