Outdoor Lights on a Sunset Schedule — Govee and LEDVANCE

Twice a year I’d go into the app and adjust the outdoor light timer. Once in spring when 21:00 was already pushing dusk. Once in autumn when it was dark at 17:30 and the lights weren’t coming on until an hour later. I never quite got it right — there’s always a week or two where the schedule is visibly wrong, lights flicking on in broad daylight or leaving the garden dark for an hour after sunset.

The fix is obvious in retrospect: stop using clock times and use the sun instead.

The setup

Two types of outdoor lights: Govee lights on the terrace, and warm gold string lights from Bauhaus controlled via LEDVANCE SMART+. Both are integrated into HA — Govee via HACS, LEDVANCE SMART+ is built in and auto-discovers devices on the local network.

The string lights are warm gold by nature — around 2200K. They don’t need a scene or a colour temperature command. They just need to be on.

The automation

One automation controls both. The on-trigger uses HA’s built-in sun platform with a 15-minute offset:

alias: Outdoor lights — Sunset on
trigger:
  - platform: sun
    event: sunset
    offset: "+00:15:00"
action:
  - service: light.turn_on
    target:
      entity_id:
        - light.govee_outdoor
        - light.bauhaus_string_lights
    data:
      brightness_pct: 100

The 15-minute offset means the lights come on after it’s actually dark — not the moment the sun technically sets, when there’s still plenty of ambient light.

The off-trigger is a fixed time:

alias: Outdoor lights — Midnight off
trigger:
  - platform: time
    at: "00:00:00"
action:
  - service: light.turn_off
    target:
      entity_id:
        - light.govee_outdoor
        - light.bauhaus_string_lights

The dashboard

A pair of Mushroom template chips showing the next trigger time. The sunset calculation pulls from the sun entity and updates daily:

- type: custom:mushroom-chips-card
  chips:
    - type: template
      icon: mdi:weather-sunset
      content: >
        On: {{ (as_timestamp(state_attr('sun.sun','next_setting'))
             + 15 * 60) | timestamp_custom('%H:%M') }}
    - type: template
      icon: mdi:weather-night
      content: "Off: 00:00"

In Denmark the sunset shift between June and December is about six hours. The lights track that automatically — as late as around 22:15 in summer, as early as around 15:30 in mid-December.

What changed

The two transition weeks in March and October where the schedule was always wrong are gone. Two triggers, two actions — but it’s one of those things that makes the house feel like it actually knows what time of year it is.