Saturday, January 23, 2021

Installing an Occupancy Sensor - Lutron MS OPS5M

 Our washroom is located in place with no windows and has doors at each end - 1 for garage and the other at the kitchen/dinette.  It tends to be pretty dark in there without the lights on and when coming in through the garage you must fumble with a light switch.

I decided an occupancy sensor was a good solution.  I bought one probably a year ago and even started a hole where I decided to put it.  I probably should have waited on the hole since I am just now finishing installing it - that's what my wife thinks for sure.  

The switch in the garage and the one at the kitchen/dinette area are 3-way switches and this sensor is a 3-way as well - which meant that I had to replace one of the existing switches. Replacing the switch in the garage made the most sense but it is on the opposite end of the room where I wanted the sensor.  Fortunately, the location in the garage is on a wall covered with particle board  (one side of my home office).  I was able to pull off the particle board to gain access to the wiring.  The hot side of the circuit was tied in at that location though which meant I would need to do "something".  This was a good thing because it turns out that the washroom lights, garage lights, some front room outlets (and some other items previously) were all tied into the same breaker for the water heater.  I was perplexed by that - I don't think other items should be tied into the water heater circuit but they are.  So this was a chance to fix part of that. After popping the particle board off the wall, I was able to take the staples out that held the wire to the studs and then feed the wire back into the attic.

In the attic, it was only a couple feet at most between the location of the switch that would remain and the location of the occupancy sensor - but the sensor is on the adjoining wall. Of course, due to our roof design, accessing these locations is beyond tight and left me feeling like a pretzel after many hours.  Yes, it was many hours of work to get things moved around in the attic.  Everything runs under the Heat Pump and much of the duct work and also ends up going through locations where perpendicular roof peaks come together. These locations are very low and also have "Can" lights in the ceiling to avoid disturbing.  

Eventually I got the wire moved and an existing wire hole in the wall top-member was large enough to feed the original wire through.  My son and I were able to tape the wire to a wire fish rod.  Once I had access to the wire at the new hole for the sensor and I started to review the required connections.  I soon realized that I had small problem.  Because power had been jumpered off another switch next to the original one I removed - I now had to find a new source.  Fortunately, the wall for the sensor has an electrical outlet on the other side within 8-inches horizontally.  I ended up pulling power from there which had the benefit of being a pretty lightly loaded circuit (instead of on water heater circuit).  The wiring isn't pretty but it works well enough. 


In above picture, you can see a few places I made holes while figuring out how to handle this.  The lower left hole is where the electric outlet is on the other side of the wall. The occupancy switch is the white blob on the left side.


Above you can see where the door for the room ends up at the intersection of 2 other room/areas.  If you walk into the washroom through this location, the lights come on within about .3-.5 seconds.  




The above pic was taken from the garage through the washroom door towards the sensor/kitchen door.  This works really well for identifying movement when the garage side door opens.   The switch I removed was located near the particle board you see on the far left side of the picture.

In the end, I got it working and the family likes it a bunch. I did have to make a number of holes but am patching those up now.  I am also very happy I was able to remove one more item off the water heater circuit. Now if I could get the front room outlets off of it, I would be extremely excited.  

I don't really want to see the attic again anytime soon though - it was pretty painful working up there this time.  This wasn't my "neatest" wiring job but it works great. 


Take care and God bless!

Scott



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