So I decided to buy the mirror that fit our requirements (bright, as thin as possible, portrait, with demister pad) and then make it "smarter" myself. The LED mirror we bought is the
Roper Rhodes Academy 600mm illuminated mirror ACM060.. Features wise we really liked this mirror, but there were 3 problems with its operation:
- 1. The demister pad turned on automatically when the LED mirror was turned on
2. I couldn't turn the mirror at the same time as my bathroom lights
3. The LED mirror would not remember it's state when power was lost
4. Wife and daughter would leave the mirror on all the time since the rest of the bathroom lights swich off automatically the mirror was left On all the time
5. I would forget to turn the mirror on before having a shower and I would find the mirror all fogged up
So the first option I tried was to see if I could put a relay in front of the mirror and turn it on/off via the relay but I quickly found out problem 3. above since the on/off touch controls didn't remember it's state (on/off), colour setting (warm or cold) nor it's brightness when the relay turned the mirror off. So if the mirror lost power the touch controls will reset itself to off and all other settings will be lost. I decided to open the unit to see what I could do.
Automating the demister pad was pretty straight forward. It was controlled by a 12v relay (which you can see in the above picture) that was driven by the touch controls. From the mains supply I wired an extra mains cable to supply a Fibaro Single 2 Relay (FGS213) and I connected the demister pad to it. To control it I wired a Fibaro Binary Sensor (I think they call it Fibaro Implant now) with a DS18B20 temperature sensor over the hot water pipe supply to my bathroom:
Finally I created a trigger that will switch the demister pad On when the DS18B20 temperature sensor went over 40C and Off when it went below 38C. On my tests this lined up within a minute of so on anyway having a shower or a bath but didn't trigger for ocasional hot water use from the basin.
Automating the LED strisp took some testing. Here is an earlier version after I replaced the existing connectors with Wago connectors to allow me to test:
After some testing with multimeter I managed to identify the two pairs of connections I needed to break: green/white and yellow/white. Turns out this LED mirror has two LED strips: one cool and one warm. When you change the LED temperature using the touch controls it starts to switch from one strip to the other. So once I identified the right cables I diverted the input LED strip cables to a Fibaro RGBW Controller 2 (FGRGBWM-442). I used a left over 5 wire LED cable I had from another project to take a 12v supply from the existing LED driver to the Fibaro RGBW relay and connect the 2 LED strips to it too. Finally I setup a trigger that will fire whenever the bathroom lights went On and voila! LED mirror now works in tandem with the bathroom lights. The the demister pad also goes off if the bathroom lights go off before the temperature sensor goes down below 38C.
Here is a picture of the finished mod ready for mounting (I used a hot glue to stick the Fibaro relays to the back of the mirror):
Very happy with the results. My only complain really is the cost of automating the mirror since I had to use 3 Fibaro devices to get it working the way I want. But it was a fun project to do and while I doubt the energy saving benefits will match the ROI I got one thing less thing to worry about being on when it shouldn't be on!