if your goal is: lights always on when garage is occupied the leviton occupancy sensor is the way to go; the trick is: don't put in place of existing switch if that won't help it notice if there is a car or person in there. It seems to be heat sensing. if there is something 'not room temperature' in there that is 'not moving' the light will stay on until that condition is no longer.

I use them in my bathroom, kitchen and hallway and there is no going back.

recently i used to add automatic lighting to four closets. i put a new 'retrofit box' right next to the light outlet in the ceiling and put some BX back and forth to the new box where i installed the switch to look down and out the closet door. This same concept would work for a garage; maybe fish wire up the wall to have an overhead view looking down and over a 'near' car that may block it's view.

The switch has about a 160° view angle and maybe 30° down. I have one on a side of a hallway and it works both ways down the hall.

All you guys are making this way to hard. Plug your light into this unit and use your remote garage opener button.
Remote Control Lighting for Garage or House | Chamberlain Do-It-Yourself Products

Neat product but separate remote control. Perfect if you want to go out into your car to turn your garage light on. You can also manually turn on and off from newer wired buttons with the "light" function but in either case that is a manual not automatic solution


Sent from my awrPhone using Tapatalk

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.

One advantage of using these switches is that in addition to automatically turning on 8 fixtures when i enter the garage with the car, they go off after
a certain period of time. Additionally the same thing happens when I enter the garage from the house. All the lights go on and stay on until I exit the garage.
On the garage door opener I used 2 5000K fluorescent screw in lamps. all this
and no magnetic contact on the door required.

I will admit I hung 8 fluorescent shop lights. 4 controlled by one switch
and 4 controlled by another switch but they all go on when I enter the garage.