HPS Tuning

Home Positioning™ System Tuning

 

The Home Positioning System can be accurately tuned so that rooms turn on and off only when they are supposed to.  You have several tools at your disposal to conquer any problems you might experience.  They are:

 

The sensors should be physically aimed correctly by the integrator.  You will know that you may need to re-aim the sensors if some parts of a room do not respond as well as others.  The analog sensor sensitivity of the sensor is set at the factory so should not need to be adjusted.  The rest of this section concentrates on using the software tools to tune the Home Positioning System.  

 

The HPS needs tuning if rooms turn on and/or off when you do not want them to.  Below are several scenarios you may encounter and what to adjust to correct them.  

 

 

  1. Lights turn off when someone is in the room:  This happens because the area sensor did not detect enough motion within a specific time.  You can fix this by increasing the occupied sensor sensitivity or increasing the Occupied Timeout for all scenes or just the scene of interest.  Begin by increasing sensor sensitivity.  If that does not work, then increase the Occupied Timeout.  Continue to alternate adjustments until the problem goes away.  You should understand the tradeoffs:  The more sensitive the sensor the more likely that you will detect things even when people are not present.  The longer the Occupied Timeout the longer the lights stay on if someone leaves a room and the entry/exit sensor does not detect them.  

  2. Lights turn on when no-one is in the room:  This is caused by the sensors thinking they picked up motion even though no-one was there.  The obvious solution is to make the unoccupied sensor less sensitive, but do not jump to this solution quite yet.  First check to see if you have a bleeding sensor.  You can tell a bleeding sensor because the lights come on when an adjacent room is occupied.  If the problem is a bleeding sensor you should be able to intentionally activate the bleeding sensor from outside that room.  Simply identify that sensor in the software as bleeding into which room.    If you do not have a bleeding sensor, then make the unoccupied sensor less sensitive.  The trade-off to this is if the entry/exit sensor does not pick you up when you enter a room it will take longer for the area sensor to identify you as a real person.  

  3. Lights stay on too long when everyone has left the room:  Here the Maybe Occupied timeout is probably too long.  Feel free to shorten this timeout, but the risk is that if someone is still in a room after another person leaves it is more likely that the room will turn off on him/her.  Another possibility is that the entry/exit sensor is bad so the room never goes to Maybe Occupied.  If this is the case, replace the sensor.

 

Below is a list of potential problems and a description of symptoms they could cause.  

 

PROBLEM

SYMPTOM

Occupied: sensor sensitivity too sensitive

After exit, room goes to maybe occupied, then back to occupied even though no one is present.  

Occupied: sensor sensitivity too insensitive

Room turns off even when occupied.

Unoccupied: sensor sensitivity too sensitive

Room turns on when no one is present.  (Usually with heat or some other small motion)

Unoccupied: sensor sensitivity too insensitive

The room takes a very long time to turn on.  (Only in combination with a bad entry/exit sensor).

Occupied: Occupied Timeout too short

Room turns off even when occupied.

Occupied: Occupied Timeout too long

The room takes a very long time to turn off (Only in combination with a bad entry/exit sensor).

Maybe occupied: Occupied Timeout too short

Room turns off when someone leaves even though someone else is still present.

Maybe occupied: Occupied Timeout too long

Lights stay on too long after exit.