Wyze bulb + Alexa Echo Flex motion sensor routine

This post explains my fix for automating the lighting in my bathroom, using an Echo Flex with motion sensor and a Wyze bulb.

These are the devices I’m referring to:

I followed all the official instructions to connect the various devices to my wifi, set them up with their respective apps, and added the Wyze skill to the Alexa app.

I then created “turn on” and “turn off” routines in the Alexa app to do the following:

• When Echo Flex detects motion in bathroom, turn on Wyze bulb
• When Echo Flex doesn’t detect motion for 10 minutes in bathroom, turn off Wyze bulb

And for about six months, everything worked flawlessly.

Then one day, seemingly out of nowhere, part of the routine broke. The “turn on” routine still works, but the “turn off” routine no longer does.

I tried every possible fix that I could find on Google, but nothing worked. There are so many possible points of failure in the process and I was impatient to try every variation.

And it was so curious to me that half the process still worked! It would have been easier to deal with if neither routine worked, because then I could just chalk it up to a motion sensor gone bad.

But today, I found a solution!

• When Echo Flex detects motion in bathroom, turn on Wyze bulb
• When Echo Flex doesn’t detect motion for 10 minutes in bathroom, turn off Wyze bulb
• When Wyze bulb has been on for 10 minutes, turn it off

Here’s how to set it up:

1. In the Wyze app, select the bulb, click the ⚙️, and select Schedules & Automations.
2. Create a new rule with the following settings:

It’s not a perfect replacement solution, but it beats having to create a crazy number of Alexa routines to turn off the light every hour of the day.

Which I did contemplate doing. But now I don’t have to. 🥳