I have some motion lights in the back of my house, I want to also be able to use them to illuminate the back when I'm out there. I drew up the following schematic, the idea is to have the motion lights "on" when the switch is in one position, "constantly" on when the switch is in another position, and off completely when the switch is in the middle.
Is there anything wrong with my schematic? Is it ok to override the motion sensor this way? Do i have to worry about back-feeding it with power?
Side note: I come from the electronics world as a hobby and the only switch I could think of is called an SPDT, is there an equivalent version for home switches? I don't think its a 3-way switch as that is used when you have more than 1 switch (although I could be mistaken).
Best Answer
The problem with a regular "3-way" switch it that it doesn't have an 'off' position where neither of the sides is connected. For that you'd need a 'center-off' switch like this Leviton 5685-2W.
Then, as others have commented, it may not be a good idea to cut power to the sensor as it could take some time to get itself restarted and operational.
So, how about this instead:
This way, the sensor is always powered, but you're switching the light between the sensor's output and the always-hot line (with the off position in the middle).
The down-side is that you'll need an extra wire in the cable so that you can bring the sensor output back to the switch.