I’ve used a lot of smart home devices in my time and I thought I’d seen them all. However, there is one device I recently purchased that really changed the game. It’s not something I ever thought I would need, but it has had a huge impact on my family and me.
What is a motion activated toilet night light?
Turn your toilet turquoise
TO motion activated toilet night light It’s exactly what it seems. It is a motion-activated night light that is placed inside the toilet. Hang over the edge of the container and illuminate a small LED inside the container, illuminating it in different colors.
The night light turns on when motion is detected and includes a lux sensorso it will only turn on if the bathroom is dark enough. If you enter the bathroom in daylight, the light does not turn on. But at night, it will light up to help you see where the toilet bowl is, without having to turn on the main light.
These devices are very inexpensive and are small enough to fit inside the container without being too obtrusive. I was worried it would get dirty and gross quickly, but it’s easy enough to install that I’m pretty much out of the woods.
Why I bought a night light for the bathroom
You don’t want to put a smart light bulb in your toilet
The reason I bought a night light for the bathroom was because I was having trouble going to the bathroom during the night. Before turning on the bathroom light, I had to go to the bathroom, turn on the main light, and then turn it off again once I was done.
The bathroom has an old fluorescent lamp and I couldn’t get one easily. dimmable smart bulb to put in its place. The other problem is that even with a smart bulb, it would light up the entire bathroom. The light would have to be pretty bright to see the bathroom, and that’s the problem.
A toilet night light illuminates only the inside of the bowl. The rest of the room remains in relative darkness.
The night problem that this strange device solves
A light that doesn’t wake you up
Until I got the night light, turning the main bathroom light on full brightness was causing real problems. My eyes would quickly adapt to the brightness of the harsh fluorescent light, making it it’s hard to go back to sleep. I often stayed awake for a long time and had a hard time falling back asleep after going to the bathroom.
The same problem also affected my children. They would go into the bathroom, turn on the light, wake up, and usually come wake me up because they wanted help getting back into bed now that they were fully awake.
A motion-activated toilet night light solved this problem. The bathroom remains quite dark and only the bowl is illuminated. It’s enough to see what you’re doing without making a mess, but it’s not enough to wake you up completely. I find it much easier to get back to sleep when using this device.
The device is not really smart
Not worth adding to Home Assistant
It’s debatable whether this really counts as a smart device. The motion night light cannot be connected to Home Assistant, for example, controlled remotely or used as part of an automation. All the logic happens internally: the motion sensor activates the LED unless the light level in the bathroom is bright enough that it doesn’t need to be turned on. I have no control over any of this.
It might be possible to add a gadget like this to home assistant connecting it to something like a ESP32 boardbut then you would need to add some kind of casing, and it all seems like too much effort just to be able to control the device remotely.
The device has some intelligence. It turns on at night when someone enters the bathroom, turns off again after a while if no more motion is detected, and it all happens without any manual interaction. To be honest, there’s really no reason you need to make it smarter than it already is.
Don’t rule it out until you’ve tried it.
A motion-activated toilet night light seems like a novelty. Why would you need your toilet bowl to glow in different colors? Having used it in my home, it’s something I now can’t imagine living without.
Sleep is really importantand this device makes it so much easier for me to get back to sleep after going to the bathroom. It was a cheap device, but to me it is priceless.
