How to schedule lights and shades to sunrise and sunset

Nine times out of ten when a customer rings us about “making the house feel lived in”, what they’re really after is lights and shades that just know what time it is — without anyone having to lift a finger. The good news is your Control4 system already tracks sunrise and sunset for your exact location, and tying your lighting and shades to those events is one of the most satisfying bits of automation we set up.

Here’s how it works on OS 3.4 and up, what the Scheduler agent can do, and how we’d recommend you programme it at home.

Why sunset beats a fixed time

The easy way to schedule a light is to say “turn the front porch on at 6:00pm”. That works fine in July when it’s dark by five. Come December, though, your porch light is blazing away while there’s still an hour of daylight left. It looks daft and wastes energy.

Control4 solves this by knowing the actual sunrise and sunset times for your home, every single day of the year. Instead of a fixed clock time, you can schedule an event to fire at sunset or sunrise, and the system shifts that time automatically as the seasons change. No re-programming in spring, no fiddling when daylight saving kicks in — it just tracks the sun.

Meet the Scheduler agent

The Scheduler agent is the part of your Control4 system that handles anything time-based. You’ll find it living quietly in the background, firing events at the times you’ve set. It’s the same agent we use for your morning wake-up lights, the kids’ “bedtime” scene, and the sunset routines we’re talking about here.

The simplest way to create and tweak these schedules yourself is through the Control4 app on your phone or tablet, or on a T3/T4 touchscreen on the wall. Bigger structural changes — like creating brand-new lighting scenes or adding shades to a room — are something we handle in Composer, but day-to-day scheduling is genuinely meant for you to control.

Sunrise and sunset as event triggers

When you build a schedule, instead of picking a clock time you choose Sunrise or Sunset as the trigger. From there you tell the system what to do — turn on a lighting scene, close the living-room shades, dim the hallway to 20% — and it’ll run that action relative to the sun every day.

Offsets: “30 minutes before sunset”

Pure sunset is rarely what you actually want. By the time the sun has fully dipped below the horizon, it’s already gloomy inside. That’s where offsets come in.

An offset lets you fire an event a set number of minutes before or after the sun event. So you can say:

• 30 minutes before sunset — bring the living and kitchen lights up gently so the house never gets that grim half-dark feeling.
• At sunset — close the west-facing shades to cut glare and keep the heat in.
• 15 minutes after sunrise — open the bedroom shades to a soft morning light rather than a sudden blast.

Offsets are where the magic really happens, because they let the house respond to fading light, not just darkness. Most of our customers settle on somewhere between 20 and 40 minutes before sunset for their main living lights.

How to schedule a sunset lighting event

Here’s the process in the Control4 app. We’ll use “living room lights 30 minutes before sunset” as the example.

1. Open the Control4 app and tap the menu (the four-square icon), then choose Agents and select Scheduler.
2. Tap Add (or the + symbol) to create a new scheduled event and give it a clear name like “Living room — dusk”.
3. Under the timing options, choose Sunset instead of a specific time.
4. Set the offset to 30 minutes before. The app will show you a small minus/plus control to dial this in.
5. Choose which days it should run — every day is fine for a dusk routine.
6. Now pick the action: select your living-room lighting scene (or the individual lights) and the level you want, say 60%.
7. Save it. That’s it — the event will now fire 30 minutes before sunset every evening, shifting automatically through the year.

You’d repeat the same steps for shades, just choosing your shade group and the position (open, closed, or a percentage) as the action.

Seasonal adjustment happens on its own

This is the bit people love. Because the schedule is anchored to sunset rather than a clock, you never have to touch it again as the seasons turn. In a Melbourne winter your dusk lights might come on around 4:50pm; in midsummer they’ll hold off until well past 8pm. The system recalculates every day based on the real position of the sun for your address.

Daylight saving is handled too — when the clocks change in October and April, your sunset-based events simply move with the new daylight, no manual intervention required. The only fixed-time schedules you’ll ever need to think about are things like “all off at 11pm”, which deliberately ignore the sun.

Holiday and away randomisation

One of the smartest things you can do before heading off on holiday is make the house look occupied. A home that’s pitch black for two weeks is an open invitation. Control4 can run your lights (and shades) on a randomised pattern so they vary slightly each night rather than clicking on at exactly 6:00pm like clockwork — which, ironically, looks more automated to anyone watching.

Depending on how your system is set up, this is done either through a randomisation option on the scheduled event itself, or via a dedicated “Vacation” or “Away” agent we configure for you. The idea is the same: lights come on around dusk, move between rooms over the evening, and switch off at varied times, so the place reads as lived-in.

If you’d like a proper one-tap “We’re away” button that handles randomised lights, sets back the heating and arms the alarm together, that’s exactly the kind of thing we build for customers — drop us a line via our contact page.

A few things worth knowing

• Shades and sun glare: west-facing rooms get hammered by late-afternoon sun. Scheduling those shades to close on a sunset offset keeps rooms cool and protects timber floors and artwork.
• Don’t fight yourself: if you’ve got both a sunset event and a fixed-time event touching the same lights, make sure they’re not contradicting each other. Keep your logic simple.
• Anything involving fixed wiring is our job: adding new lighting circuits, switchboard work or hard-wired keypads is licensed-electrician territory under AS/NZS 3000. Our team handles that side; you handle the scheduling. You can read more about how Control4 schedules events on the official Control4 site.

Once you’ve got a couple of sunset routines running, you’ll wonder how you lived without them. The house just feels after you — lights easing up as the day fades, shades drawing themselves at dusk, everything shifting with the seasons while you get on with your evening.

If you’d like a hand setting up your scenes or building a proper holiday mode, give us a shout — we’re always happy to jump on and get it humming for you.

Cheers,
Adam and the DUKE team