Help! Using Apilio to dim lights at sunset, but only if they are on

Help! Community Support
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Hi all. I would like to use Apilio to dim my Kasa dimmer switches at sunset, but only do this if the lights are on. I do not want it to turn the lights on (and activate the dimmed setting) if the lights are off. Any advice?

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Well, the ideal would be a way to use some sort of a trigger at the Kasa level to know whether the light was on or off. I assume their IFTTT integration doesn’t support that?

If you couldn’t do that, I think you’d probably have to have some other way to tell Apilio that the lights were on or off, which would be inconvenient. Maybe use some sort of smart button to tell Apilio that the lights are on, or a voice command through Google or Alexa? If you wanted to, you could set the condition to require that it was set within the past day, so that leaving that variable set for multiple days wouldn’t result in them turning on unexpectedly the next day.

Without some sort of good trigger to tell Apilio when the lights are on though, this is going to be tough, I think.

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Is April able to see if the lights are already on?

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It’s super-odd that Kasa doesn’t share status publicly (especially since it certainly seems to share status with Google Home) but perhaps you could introduce a very simple light sensor to let you know if the lights are on or not? So above a certain light level you could have a variable set to true whereas below a certain level it could set a variable to false; this is a relatively easy way to have the light status determined. Thanks for the great question and good luck! DanT

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That’s not a bad idea. Any recommendations of what to get?

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I use lights sensor via smartthings, but that is expensive option, unless you already have smartthings

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I’m aware of two options:

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Thanks for the recomendaition!

Crazy that Kasa doesn’t share its status publicly. I assume Apilio can’t tap into Google Home to see if they are on, right?

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We are evaluation other integrations as well (Google Home, Alexa, …) but until recently, they all where not very open to other services taking an active role on the platform.
Of course we are following updates and there is an interesting development at Google (Device Access) that we are checking out.
As for now, we do not have any integration with Google Home.