Automate Earth Hour

[ewelin]

Last year my wife wanted us to participate in Earth Hour (https://www.myearthhour.org), so I decided to automate the process to make sure everything non-vital was powered down. I did this with a program that I scheduled to run on the day that Earth Hour happens. Now Earth Hour happens from 8:30pm to 9:30pm local time on the last Saturday of March. Unfortunately when I got to the schedule part, I realized HCA wasn't able to schedule "last Saturday of March". What I ended up doing was creating a program that I scheduled to run every Saturday at 8:30pm and inside the program I checked to see if the dates were between March 26 and March 31. All of my non-vital devices are in a group which the program turns off. I also wanted to be nice to the family and dimmed the bathroom light and my son's bedroom light to 20% 1 minute prior to power off. That away if anyone was within those rooms, the light wouldn't just go totally off on them. The program then waits until 9:30pm and turns on the only device that's still scheduled to be on at that time and that's the lights in our built in cabinet in our dinning room.

I may adjust the program this year as I just installed a few wireless speakers in our place. If I can get a decent voice and have them working well, I may have HCA speak a 5 and 1 minute warning. If I do make the changes, I'll try and upload those here as well.

I've included an export of this program as well as a few of the devices I control so you can get an idea of how I do it. The only thing to remember is that it has to be scheduled to run every Saturday at 8:30pm.

Hope others find it useful.