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How to automatically turn lights on at sunset with Google Home

July 11, 2020 by Kevin C. Tofel 8 Comments

On our most recent IoT Podcast episode, Dean called in to the IoT voicemail hotline asking how to use Google Home for automatically turning on his Philips Hue and Wemo lights at sunset. Sunset and sunrise automations can be very useful, so I can totally understand this question. I understand it even more because you’d think this would be easy to accomplish with Google Home. It’s not.

So the bad news is that custom Routines in a Google Home environment can only be triggered by exact set times. There aren’t any options for sunrise or sunset triggers, which is confounding. Other hubs have had these trigger times for years now; they’re available for Amazon Alexa, HomeKit, SmartThings, and Wink, for example.

But all is not lost!

What Dean can do is hop on over to IFTTT and set up two automation recipes to accomplish this. Yes, I said two recipes because IFTTT can only fire off one device command per trigger event.

The easiest way to do this is select the Weather Underground channel for both of these recipes because it can provide your local sunrise and/or sunset times. That’s the first part of the “If this then that….” approach.

The second part would be to connect Philips Hue, Wemo, or whatever other device brand you want to include, to the recipe and set the command to turn your lights on.

In the end, you’ll have a cloud-based automation that fires off and your local sunset time and turns your lights on. Remember, because IFTTT can only send a command to one device per automation, you will have to configure separate recipes for each device you want to take action at the specified time.

Is this ideal? No. Having a more locally-based automation, scene or routine will work more consistently and quicker in most cases.

However, the Google Home / Assistant approach doesn’t yet rival the power of a traditional, fully-featured smart home hub, which is why we’re relying on a third-party service in this case. If Google would simply add “sunset” and “sunrise” to its routine triggers, we wouldn’t have to do that.

To hear Dean’s question, as well as our discussion in full, tune in to the IoT Podcast below:

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Related

Filed Under: Featured, How-To Tagged With: Amazon Echo, automations, google assistant, Google Home, homekit, IFTTT, SmartThings, Weather Underground, Wink

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Comments

  1. Ron Bruintjes says

    September 20, 2020 at 6:39 pm

    If you’re using Hue lights, isn’t a easier to create a routine in the Hue app, which does have the ability to trigger on sunset?

    Reply
  2. tasneem says

    November 19, 2020 at 5:21 pm

    So how do I do this? Can you please explain in complete details how to setup the IFTTT recipes?
    thanks

    Reply
    • Justin says

      November 25, 2020 at 9:57 am

      Google home now allows you to schedule using the sunset and sunrise keywords and you can also do offsets such as, “Turn on the living room lights 10 minutes prior to sunset”

      Reply
      • Richard says

        December 7, 2020 at 6:50 am

        Yes it will work. But how do you get it to work 7 days a week without scheduling it every night.

        Reply
        • Justin says

          December 7, 2020 at 9:34 am

          Make a routine that runs daily at some time that then schedules your sunrise/sunset actions for the day.

          Example:
          Name: Schedule Daylight Automations
          Schedule: Runs daily at 4 AM

          Command 1: Turn on the living room lights 10 minutes prior to sunrise
          Command 2: Turn on the exterior lights at sunset

          Reply
          • Tasneem says

            December 7, 2020 at 12:53 pm

            Hello
            Ok, will give it a try.
            But I have another problem with this also. I have a routine, which runs daily at sunset and 40 minutes prior to sunrise, which is playing a specific playlist on youtube. This runs on the Google Hub, but does not run on any google minis I have around the house. On the google minis, it gives me error: i can’t play it here you can ask me to play on other devices

            anyone else have this error?

            thanks

  3. Justin says

    December 7, 2020 at 9:33 am

    Make a routine that runs daily at some time that then schedules your sunrise/sunset actions for the day.

    Example:
    Name: Schedule Daylight Automations
    Schedule: Runs daily at 4 AM

    Command 1: Turn on the living room lights 10 minutes prior to sunrise
    Command 2: Turn on the exterior lights at sunset

    Reply
    • Justin says

      December 7, 2020 at 9:34 am

      Sorry, double post, meant to reply to a comment.

      Reply

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