Innovative wireless light switch could cut house wiring costs in half

It's really nice to be able to use a remote to turn lights on and off from my bed or desk, or use voice control when my hands are full.

Plus, I can have dimmable lights even in locations with a three way switch like a hallway.

Color temperature control is not really possible with hard wired controls either. I'm actually considering replacing all my switches with in-wall remotes.

That way, it's easy to extend the circuit later if you make modifications to the structure.

Then it becomes buying a whole new wall panel instead of just patching the drywall.

Beyond that, you have the problem of insulation. If your wall isn't a contiguous piece of plaster, it will leak air. Then you have to contend with your insulation material releasing fiberglass fragments or whatever into the room. You also have to deal with some way of fixturing the wall panels to the support structure, or they'll all rattle any time you open a door. You also have to just hope that someone is still making the exact same panels decades after the fact. Most rework is done in houses that are several decades old. I don't think that many building materials suppliers that built my house in the 1920s still exist.

Any sort of modular system will always be more expensive than drywall and plaster. If you want to address all of the problems and make it as good as drywall, no one could afford it.

The electrical system is just as integral to the structure as plumbing or ventilation is. You are not going to be replacing things often, and the effort of patching drywall every decade or so is not that much. If, for some reason, you want to move your outlets every six months, we already have solutions for that. You can put conduit and boxes on the outside of the wall.

All in all, it's an awful lot of trouble and expense to make it very slightly easier to do work you only do every decade or so.

There are already a bunch of Zigbee energy harvesting switches on the market that work well. There's the Hue Tap that I mentioned, plus other commenters have pointed out other ones.

If you replace the "one or two RF power transmitters to power up all switches inside the house" with a Zigbee gateway you've got a packaged solution that you can buy right now.

The rest of the article talks about sensors, "seamless automation", etc and feels like future thinking (i.e., they don't have a solution here but they're working on it), but also feels like more already-solved problems.

For example, lighting driven by occupancy is something you can easily do by adding a Zigbee motion sensor to the system.

HVAC zoning is also a thing, but a lot more complicated as it requires dampers and needs to be designed as a complete system. You can't simply open the dampers for just the occupied rooms, you have to keep in mind that the furnace needs to maintain a minimum amount of airflow so that it doesn't overheat. You could also go with a mini-split heat-pump system where each major room (e.g., bedrooms and living rooms) will basically have its own HVAC system. I doubt that the costs of a zoned HVAC system would ever pay for itself in energy savings vs, e.g., an Ecobee thermostat plus sensors (another off-the-shelf solution that you can buy right now).

There used to be a switch made by Lutron that's close. It's held in the wall plate with a little tab and it works with Hue, but they discontinued it a few years ago, and it's exceptionally hard to find them now.

Power outages are rare, though; I've not bothered configuring the soft-switched bulbs.

These wireless switches need relays to work, so factor that in. And then factor in the time it takes your $120/hr electrician to figure out how the wireless switches work.

I would use a $30 Lutron Pico with a button cell and RF communication over this silly device that generates its own power.

But what do I know, I only sell electrical services for a living.