RMS18 - Disabling the Dusk/Dawn Sensor
First of all, I would definitely like to start out with giving credit where credit is due. I didn't come up with this idea all by myself, though given enough time and desperation I am fairly certain I could have. A, I believe though I'm not questioning the politeness of the individual but rather the gender as it's not stated on the site, gentleman had posted many different ways to modify X10 modules. One being the disabling of the Dusk/Dawn feature on their motion sensors. His site can be found at http://www.geocities.com/ido_bartana/.Well, first of all, you may be wondering why you would want to disable the Dusk/Dawn sensor. Well, in the HawkEye Sensor, there is no button combination to disable it yourself and in some instances it is VERY annoying. I'll explain what it does.
You have it set to turn things on/off when it senses motion. Lets say you set it to A3. The dusk/dawn feature triggers when it sees light or dark, so when it sees dark it sends an on to your unit code + 1. So in this example, it would turn A4 on. Then when it gets light, it would turn A4 off. Well, it is rather inconvenient to space all of your devices out by two (A1, A3, A5, etc.). If you had set them to A1, A2, A3 you would have things going on and off at unexpected times. Now, granted, you may want this feature so by all means I'm don't disable it. But, if this annoys you like it did me, it's really simple to fix. All you need is a screwdriver and some black electrical tape.
First of all, it is probably a good idea to remove the batteries first. I'm too cool for that so you'll see in my pictures I didn't. You will need to remove the 4 screws on the back. The front of plate should remove rather easily. You need to identify the dusk/dawn sensor. It is a little component that has a squiggly line through it. Notice the wonderful picture with the fantastic labeling.
Simply take a chunk of black electrical tape and cover as much of that sensor as you can. Make sure that it won't slide off easily, and also be careful to not block that circular component to the upper left. That's the motion sensor, the part that you want to keep working. Anyway, after you are done it should look like this... Notice the wonderful blurry picture with yet another fantastic label.
Now simply put back on the cover, put back in the 4 screws, put back in your batteries if you were smart, unlike me, and took them out. And of course if you removed your batteries, you may need to reprogram it.
Ok, now I have to warn you that this doesn't work 100%. I did quite a bit of testing and if you hold the sensor up to a fully lit light bulb it still triggers sometimes. To be clear, we are talking about holding this sensor so close to the light bulb that it could melt plastic or burn a finger. Normally you don't have that much light going into one of these sensors (hopefully) so it won't be a problem. I just wanted to make it clear that if you were to say use one of these within close proximity to the sun, it may still trigger. Otherwise, it will always think it's night time and you won't run into that annoying problem I had.
