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I have two lamps wired to a 3-way regular switch: one in a hallway and another one on the staircase following it. I would like to change the regular switch with motion detection occupancy one, but there's a problem. One of the 3-way switches is in the hallway, but the other one is in the living room (adjacent to the staircase). Which means that if I change the switch to an occupancy one, it will trigger when people are just moving in the living room, not necessarily going to the staircase.

I can see a couple of solutions, but they are too time consuming/expensive:

  1. Move the living room staircase switch to the staircase. But I would like to avoid doing it because it's too much work.
  2. Remove the regular switches completely and buy occupancy sensors that are installed directly on the lamps. It's a better solution than (1), but such sensors could be difficult to match to the existing lamps.

I'm wondering if there's a solution that would be something like this: - Replace the hallway switch with 3-way occupancy one - Install another 3-way occupancy sensor on/near the staircase lamp - Keep or remove the living room switch currently used to control the staircase lamp

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There are more choices than you might think

http://www.leviton.com/OA_HTML/SectionDisplay.jsp?section=38557&minisite=10251

I am thinking you might want a 3-way, manual on, auto off.

But whatever Pattern, Coverage, Time delay, or Switch type, you will likely find it here.

You can get leviton stuff anywhere, it is likely one of these would be a special order, or buy it online.

Do not worry about bad amazon reviews on these things, they are usually a case of the switch being more clever than the installer.

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I found a suitable workaround. It is quite simple, but I wasn't aware of when I asked the original question because I didn't know how these things worked.

The solution is just to buy one 3-way occupancy sensor and place it in the hallway and keep the staircase one (located in the living room) as is (i.e. regular manual switch). It will cover 80% of use cases and also work when someone turns the manual ON -- it will automatically shut it off when no motion is detected in the hallway.

A couple of references from Amazon Q&A:

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