It’s been a long….long time coming. As of November 2017, you can add sunrise and sunset routines to any of your Hue devices. Previously, you could only accomplish this by manually setting routines at set times and adjusting them frequently for the changing sunrise and sunset times, or by using IFTTT recipes.
This seems like it was a pretty obvious feature for Hue to have included from the get go, but it’s taken them more than a few years and tons of complaints to add the feature. Thankfully, they did it right and included the ability to set an offset, allowing you to trigger the routines at a specified amount of time before sunset or after sunrise. This is important because your house will generally be dark long before the sun has actually set, and will remain dark for a while after sunrise.
Here’s how to set it up:
- From within the Hue app, click the cog icon to open the settings
- Next, open the Advanced settings
- Here you will have to set your home location, so Hue knows when sunrise and sunset will be in your area. This is a required step for these routines. If you try to skip to just setting up the routine, you will be prompted to set your location.
- Also in the advanced options, you can set your sunrise and sunset offset by tapping the option and then opening the start before sunset or start after sunrise menus
- After you’ve set your location and the optional offsets, tap the back button twice to exit the advanced menu
- Next, open the Routines tab by tapping the clock icon
- Open the Other routines menu
- Tap the + at the bottom right to add a new routine and select either At sunset or At sunrise
- Name your routine
- The When should it start field should already be populated with your sunrise or sunset choice
- Choose the days of the week that you want this to run by tapping the letter for each day
- You can also choose an amount of time for the brightness to fade in or out. If you chose an offset in the earlier steps, this could slowly compensate for the lack of, or increasing, sunlight. You could also just leave this at the default, which is Instant.
- Finally, select the rooms you would like to be included in the routine. If you want rooms to behave differently, you will have to set up multiple routines.
- When you have finished, tap SAVE in the upper right corner