Don’t put your Hue Bridge and internet router directly next to each other. Yes, Hue provider a short Ethernet cable to link the two together – but it’s possible for the close distance between the two to cause signal interference (i.e. WiFi and ZigBee signals clashing with each other). If you can get a longer Ethernet cable to put some physical distance between the devices, that’s ideal. To test out whether this is the cause, try moving your Hue motion sensor close to your Hue Bridge – close enough that there’s a direct line of sight between the two. If the configured lights still don’t come on, try moving one of the configured light bulbs nearby too (again, a direct line of sight is best). If it then works, you have a ZigBee interference problem. If it starts working okay, it’s a range issue. The easiest way of fixing this is to harness the ZigBee mesh and put a ‘ZigBee repeater’ between the Hue sensor and Hue bridge. If those words don’t make much sense to you, don’t worry: basically if you buy a cheap Philips Hue bulb (a white one is fine) and put it between the two devices, the Hue bulb will act as a relayer for the ZigBee signal and increase the overall range of your Hue motion sensor.

You can adjust the motion sensors’ daylight sensitivity – motion sensors can detect how much daylight there is in the room (or outside) and will not trigger the lights when there is sufficient daylight. But if you'd like your lights to be triggered when there is more or even less sunlight in the room, you can adjust the daylight sensitivity in the app. What Hue adds to the equation is the ability to trigger up to 3 groups of lights at once, complete with in-app controls for how the lights should behave. Doing so is easy enough -- just tell the app what scene you'd like your lights to jump to whenever motion is detected, what scene they should return to once motion is stopped, and how long after motion stops before that happens. This is especially important for the Philips Hue Outdoor motion sensor which will have a shorter than normal range due to passing through your home’s external walls. Cause #6: A Reset May be NeededThe other devices near it (a NAS and network switch) aren’t routers or transmitters themselves, so they don’t have much change of interfering with the ZigBee signals. Cause #5: ZigBee Range Issues But, of course, the battery will still run out. When it’s starting to fail, you may get sporadic motion triggers and eventually it’ll just stop triggering altogether. The easiest way to test if this is the issue is the same as I cover earlier: move your Hue sensor to be in line-of-sight (and only a few yards/metres away) from the Hue Bridge. Following on from my point above about ZigBee interference, the other potential issue is when your Hue motion sensor is too far away from your Hue Bridge (or any other Hue bulbs – something I’ll discuss shortly).

When setting up the motion sensors in the Philips Hue app, you’ll be able to program the lights for two timeslots: day and night. If you’d rather your motion sensor only be activated at night, you can program your lights to do nothing during the day. For each time slot, you can also program how long your lights will stay on after being triggered, ranging from one minute to an hour. One of the things that’s both good – and annoying! – about the Philips Hue motion sensor is that it has a dusk filter, also known as a daylight filter. What this means is that it might not trigger when there’s a lot of daylight around. There may still be some quirks with those scene controls, though -- during one batch of tests at the CNET Smart Home, I set the front yard lights to turn on to an icy blue, "arctic aurora" scene whenever motion was detected. Instead, they turned on to the default soft white, even after multiple attempts. I tried switching the automation to a different scene -- the hot white "Energize" setting -- but still, the lights would turn on to a yellowy soft white.

Hue's sensitive side

The way this item works is that it has a PIR (passive infrared) sensor in the middle which detects infrared signatures (such as a person walking by) and it can be configured to turn your Philips Hue light bulbs on and off (or to different brightnesses and colors) as required. But what if you do still want it to trigger? After all, you might have your Hue motion sensor near your front door (where there’ll be light coming through the door glass), but you want it to turn lights on deeper into your house that don’t get as much daylight. Solving this can be frustrating and be a case of trial and error, but some key tips to remember are: The higher up you place your Hue Bridge and motion sensor, the less chance there is of furniture and floor-level electrical devices interfering with the ZigBee signals.