Way off topic, need some home elc help

[jdstrickland]

The sensor has 3 wires, black, white, and red. It may have a ground, but this is not important.

In a wall switch plate, take the plate off and the switch out. Wire the white to the existing batch of white wires. Connect the black to the black that is hot all of the time, and connect the red to the black that goes to the lighting circuit.

The sensor will see motion and pass power through the red wire out to the fixtures you want to have on.

[cn90]

flybye,

You will be surprised the range of the infrared in the Wall Switch by Leviton (mentioned above).
My Leviton wall switch motion sensor sits in the corner, yet as soon as the car enters the garage, the ceiling light is ON.

[jdstrickland]

Originally Posted by trader4

He hasn't even identified a proposed sensor, so IDK how you know
how it hooks up, that it's AC, etc.

"It may have a ground, but this is not important"

A proper ground is critical, especially when he's talking about mounting
it to some unknown location on a garage door. If he mounts the
sensor part to the metal door track for example, if it comes with a
ground wire and you don't correctly ground it, you have a major code
violation and a safety issue.

He has not asked his question very well. I did not tell him how to wire his sensor, I told him how to wire the typical sensor that one is going to find at the hardware store, and that mounts to a switch box on the wall.

A typical motion sensor light switch that you buy at Home Depot/Lowes gets installed into a standard light switch housing on the wall. It will have a BLK, WHT, & RED wire. It might have a ground, and the box that the light switch is mounted may or may not have a ground. If there is a ground, use it, if there is no ground, then no big deal. The BLK & WHT wires of the sensor go to the line wires of the box, the RED on the sensor goes to the load wire in the box. This is universally true.

There are other motion sensors that do not mount into a switch box, but I get the feeling that discussing them is not relevant until the question is asked better than it has been asked so far.

The door motor uses a relay to put power to the light sockets built into the motor. You can put a CFL into these sockets, I put them into mine. The CFLs are not very happy because they like to remain on for a much longer duration than they are on in the door motor. CFLs prefer to be on for 15+ minutes, not 2 or 3 minutes.

The door motor can power 2 ea. 60W bulbs, it can power a fluorescent fixture without any problems.

The house should have garage lights, and a switch to turn them on and off. It is possible, likely, that a motion sensor can be mounted to the box where the existing garage light is, and new fixtures connected to the sensor. In this configuration, the garage light switch would be left on -- or removed and the wires connected permanently so that motion sensor is the only control for the lights downstream from it.

But this brings us full circle to the point where we do not understand the goal, so arriving at the solution is difficult.