I would like to turn on mood lighting automatically when I’m taking a shower, what’s the best way to detect that?
- I’ve considered humidity sensors, but that will take a while to kick in and not immediately when the shower starts.
- I’ve also considered a water leak sensor but those are not meant to be trigger every day for a long time like 10-15 minutes. That would kill the battery, right?
- Smart valves can kind of work, but it feels like overkill because I don’t care about the valve functionality.
I would prefer the solution to be battery powered (don’t want to be messing with too many cables around a shower), but I can’t seem to find one.
The right way is some sort of inline water flow sensor, so it’ll trigger within seconds of you turning on the shower to warm it up. With an esp32 and a sensor, and some clever use of the sleep function, it’d probably last a year or so on a couple of AA’s.
Low effort and price tech is probably better in a wet environment though! If you just want the mood lighting, get a wireless button and stick it somewhere near. Tap it on, tap it off!
If you want to feel that automatic magic, consider a cheap battery powered temperature sensor. If you fix the chassis to the shower head pipe it’d probably be accurate enough. Also, assuming you need to wait for your shower to heat up, you’d have a pretty good idea when your shower was hot too - when it triggers your automation for the lights!
Just make sure the sensor polls often enough or can be made to report on a significant temperature difference in a timely fashion. Something like this might do it: https://sonoff.tech/products/sonoff-zigbee-temperature-and-humidity-sensor-snzb-02p
Also avoid WiFi for buttons, connection and addressing takes ages and sicks for an instant response needed for something like lighting changes