If this is happening, your Hue motion sensor might be detecting you just fine, but it either can’t send the ‘message’ to your Hue Bridge or the Hue Bridge can’t fully send the signals to turn your lightbulbs on. But the end result is the same: thinking that the Hue sensor itself is at fault!

This is especially important for the Philips Hue Outdoor motion sensor which will have a shorter than normal range due to passing through your home’s external walls. Cause #6: A Reset May be NeededFollowing on from my point above about ZigBee interference, the other potential issue is when your Hue motion sensor is too far away from your Hue Bridge (or any other Hue bulbs – something I’ll discuss shortly). As with all Philips Hue devices, the outdoor motion sensor uses a ZigBee radio for command and control. As such, adding one will extend the range of your Philips Hue network, which might be particularly useful if you’re installing Hue products outside your home and you discover that the required Hue Bridge is having difficulty reaching them. You can install any combination of Philips Hue indoor sensors, outdoor sensors, and wireless switches, but you’re limited to 12 such devices on a single network. The other devices near it (a NAS and network switch) aren’t routers or transmitters themselves, so they don’t have much change of interfering with the ZigBee signals. Cause #5: ZigBee Range Issues

But what if you do still want it to trigger? After all, you might have your Hue motion sensor near your front door (where there’ll be light coming through the door glass), but you want it to turn lights on deeper into your house that don’t get as much daylight. The way this item works is that it has a PIR (passive infrared) sensor in the middle which detects infrared signatures (such as a person walking by) and it can be configured to turn your Philips Hue light bulbs on and off (or to different brightnesses and colors) as required.

The verdict

Related Reading: Philips Hue Motion Sensor Battery Guide: All You Need To Know Cause #4: ZigBee Interference

One thing I found really odd when I first started using Philips Hue’s light bulbs was that they update. I mean, light bulbs that have software updates – really?! But since they’re smart products, they update themselves – same as the Hue motion sensors does.

Hue's sensitive side

You can adjust the motion sensors’ daylight sensitivity – motion sensors can detect how much daylight there is in the room (or outside) and will not trigger the lights when there is sufficient daylight. But if you'd like your lights to be triggered when there is more or even less sunlight in the room, you can adjust the daylight sensitivity in the app. You can adjust the motion sensors’ daylight sensitivity — motion sensors can detect how much daylight there is in the room (or outside) and will not trigger the lights when there is sufficient daylight. But if you'd like your lights to be triggered when there is more or even less sunlight in the room, you can adjust the daylight sensitivity in the app. What Hue adds to the equation is the ability to trigger up to 3 groups of lights at once, complete with in-app controls for how the lights should behave. Doing so is easy enough -- just tell the app what scene you'd like your lights to jump to whenever motion is detected, what scene they should return to once motion is stopped, and how long after motion stops before that happens. Fortunately, those steps are not difficult to figure out. The sensor can trigger multiple Philips Hue smart bulbs and luminaires at once, but its trigger is based on rooms, not individual fixtures. When you install Philips Hue bulbs or fixtures, the app has you assign those devices to “rooms.” When you configure the motion detector, the app allows you to select a maximum of three rooms in which all Hue bulbs assigned to those rooms can be controlled whenever motion is detected. There may still be some quirks with those scene controls, though -- during one batch of tests at the CNET Smart Home, I set the front yard lights to turn on to an icy blue, "arctic aurora" scene whenever motion was detected. Instead, they turned on to the default soft white, even after multiple attempts. I tried switching the automation to a different scene -- the hot white "Energize" setting -- but still, the lights would turn on to a yellowy soft white.

When setting up the motion sensors in the Philips Hue app, you’ll be able to program the lights for two timeslots: day and night. If you’d rather your motion sensor only be activated at night, you can program your lights to do nothing during the day. For each time slot, you can also program how long your lights will stay on after being triggered, ranging from one minute to an hour.

The HomeKit connection

One of the things that’s both good – and annoying! – about the Philips Hue motion sensor is that it has a dusk filter, also known as a daylight filter. What this means is that it might not trigger when there’s a lot of daylight around. You can tell if this is ‘affecting’ your Hue motion sensor in the Hue app. If it says “Inactive” and “Sufficient daylight” under the device (accessible by going to Settings then Accessories in the Hue app), it’s intentionally ‘disabled’. When this happens, your motion sensor may simply be out of range and so it will appear “not to work” but this is actually caused by the motion sensor being unable to send a “motion triggered” message to the Hue Bridge.