My office also has a motion-sensing light switch with a 10-minute timer. I’ve learned a couple of things about it over the years:
There seems to be a time delay, meaning that for ~5 seconds after the lights go off, nothing I do will work.
the sensor is optimized to detect horizontal motion rather than vertical motion. I suspect other brands/models of motion-sensing switches behave in a similar way.
OP can try, but I think this is unlikely to work. The sensor is looking for a change in the infrared landscape of sufficient magnitude and rapidity as to clearly indicate the presence of a human being. This means that a person sitting motionless in full view of the sensor won’t trigger it, and probably neither will the motion of a room-temperature fan blade, and e.g. probably neither will a toaster, which warms up too slowly to meet the threshold of “sufficient rapidity.”
When my lights go out, and after I’ve wait for the five-second lock-out period, I find that I can reliably get my lights to switch on by ducking my head laterally behind a bookcase (so no IR is seen by the sensor) and then moving my head back into full view of the sensor. Ducking your head behind a computer monitor might not do it, as monitors tend to be quite warm, and popping your head out from behind one doesn’t change the overall IR signature that much. OTOH, it’s easy to try.
Yeah. I just like the show and saw an opportunity to shoehorn that joke in. I mean, there’s no reason a racist motion sensor couldn’t be racist against a fair skinned Italian girl, right? Maybe it’s not racist and it just doesn’t like girls, or Italians.
That might do it. The closer it is to the sensor, the smaller it could be. I just bought a plug-in timer switch that lets you program on-off cycles at pretty much whatever interval you like, so you could set it to cycle every nine minutes.
If office management frowns on hacks like this that effectively disable energy conservation efforts (you could accidentally cause the lights to e on 24/7 with this solution), you could just rig the incandescent light with a remote switch by your desk. Then when the room lights turn off, you just push a button at your desk briefly to light the incandescent light so as to trigger the motion sensor.
This is why I suggested the wavy gas-station tube man. It’s very unlikely anyone would forget to turn it off later.
On the other hand, if there really is an infrared component to the sensor, it may be necessary to set the wavy tube man on fire, which would necessarily limit the duration of its effectiveness.
That’s typical. They only go in for a while. The intention is that the lights go out on their own when no one is using the space.
They don’t work very well in office buildings. I have been in a lot of meetings with the lights going out. For that matter, when i “hotel” in an office at work, the lights go out pretty regularly while i am at work. I have gotten good at waving them back on.
The worst was when we moved to a new building with a sensor in the bathroom. But it couldn’t see you if you were in a stall. If you, for instance, had to rummage through your bag for a new tampon, the lights turned out, and you couldn’t get them to turn on without leaving the stall. Oh, and the inside of the bathroom was pitch black when the lights were out and the main door was closed.
They fixed it by setting them to stay on for a lot longer after they’d been triggered, like half an hour, or maybe even 2 hours. But it was pretty bad for a while.
