What brand of smart lightbulbs do you use? Thanks for all your hard work!
Also, I too wanted to extend to you a really big THANK YOU from a very happy member of the HASS community. I came over from OpenHAB a handful of years ago and I couldn't be happier. Please keep up the good work! Good luck with all the hardware sales and Nabu Casa stuff!
edit: clarified that I used to run OpenHAB
In real terms though, it not that bad. I've got about 25 such devices always online and the traffic really is negligible. Most devices aren't sending anything while nothing is happening except for the periodic heartbeat like once a minute. Its not noticeable, even on my 20MHz wide network.
i'm personally avoiding wifi devices now and holding out for matter/thread variants
I’ve managed to bind them using Matter bindings, so even if HA is offline, the switches can still on/off and dim the bulbs.
No UI supports this yet (though I think HA is working towards it), but the underlying protocol support exists, and products are starting to come to market that take advantage of it.
I think it 2-4 years, it’ll probably be ironed out and working well, but if you really want it, you can have that now with matter/thread.
I think Zigbee devices also have bindings, and those should probably be a lot more mature, but I haven’t played with those yet.
I have 100% Zigbee lights, and each lighting circuit has a Shelly Plus 1 with the relay in "detached" mode (so the shelly will sense the light switch changing from open to closed and send a command to HA to turn on the lights via Zigbee). Most (all?) smart bulbs have a setting for "what do I do when power is restored" and you can set it so that they come on when power is restored.
You can then create a script that uses the MQTT HomeAssistant up/down topic and if HA is down, when the switch changes position operate the relay.
It's not perfect - if you have a powercut during the night all of your lights will come on when power is restored.
Will look into Shelly
Perhaps have a look! Thanks for all your work again, I love HA
The core problem with a smart light is that it very likely has a switch somewhere. If someone turns that switch off, that smart light just lost power and became dumb. Turning it back on now involves a trip to the switch.
A smart switch is smart so long as utility power is running and you never find yourself in a position where the managed device is in an unknown and/or uncontrollable state.
And to parent question: Lifx still has the best color/brightness of any smart bulb and they’re IMO the best. Just make sure your WiFi can handle it.
Home assistant works amazingly well with zigbee devices, and these are plentiful and cheap etc, and don't rely on working wifi/IP infrastructure. When I sell up, my zigbee switches will work just fine as plain-ole light switches even with all my Home Assistant infra ripped out, leaving no issues for next buyer.
You can add zigbee support to pretty much any Home Assistant setup with a 20 buck USB adapter, Home Assistant even make an official one:
https://www.home-assistant.io/connectzbt1/
The also sell Home Assistant servers with zigbee radios built in:
https://www.home-assistant.io/yellow/
The light switches are often cheaper than wifi equivalents too. Wifi bulbs should really only be considered by renters IMO - people who can't easily replace wall switches or similar.
This might not matter if you're pushing everything through a hub like HA, but if you want to connect directly with other devices and remotes then it likely won't work.
Zigbee access to the bulb is great for stuff like changing whitebalance etc though. In my own home I have the bulbs and the switch on ZigBee so I can do this, but power on/off is solely preserve of the automated switch.
* I don't trust any company to use my Wi-Fi and not attempt to access the broader internet. A Zigbee or Z-Wave device isn't going to be able to stealthily update itself in anti-user ways, nor is it going to be hijacked into serving as part of a Bitcoin botnet.
* There are way too many devices, which can cause issues if they're all using Wi-Fi at the same time. Smart homes take a router that would normally be dealing with 2-4 phones and 2-4 laptops and add N bulbs, M switches, P contact sensors, Q motion sensors, and assorted random sensors. Not a chance am I hooking that much up to my Wi-Fi.
Z-Wave LR has worked very well for me—no mesh to worry about, just a controller and devices. The only downside is that it's not as broadly supported as zigbee or Wi-Fi.
My devices can't reach the internet at all, but I have easy access to them the other way.
I agree in principle that this is much nicer in theory. Just like wired is more reliable than wireless. However, retrofitting all that is also much more difficult.
If you own a property but don't live there (eg, you're a landlord), it's essentially never legal. The best answer is to contact the local AHJ.
Now you benefit from both, like being able to make the lights fade off/on.
Also, in case it doesn’t always respond instantly, you should be able to bind the Zigbee devices directly to each other so that it doesn’t need to travel to the Zigbee coordinator (or mesh?) first. Haven’t had the need for this myself though.
Dimmable smart switch plus dimmable standard bulbs accomplish this. No color (though Phillips has a line that tints red when dimmed.)
That seems like the best of all worlds.
Networked smart switch. Switch in absolute authority of light. Switch still able offer advanced light features (e.g. hue set).
https://sonoff.tech/product-review/product-insight/zbmini-ex...
I assume they hack what little power they need from the AC wobble? How do they do that without triggering a current leakage cutout though? Perhaps they “charge” when current flows for the first time?
The way it works is you put a bypass capacitor to neutral in the light fixture, and then it lets the switch be powered - no flicker or low energy requirements needed.
They're not open source so I thought maybe their other stuff isn't either. I didn't even know they made switches in fact.
Several of my friends have the homey, they're very popular here because athom is a Dutch company and they market here a lot. But I prefer the openness of home assistant.
Edit: Aah I see the confusion. The athom that makes the esphome devices is a Chinese copycat company that has nothing to do with the real athom but is trying to get a free ride on their name.
They've just received an injunction banning their sales in the EU and have to take back all their products sold here. https://community.homey.app/t/athom-wins-lawsuit-against-chi...
I had never heard of the Chinese company before.
Putting significant return current through ground means anything in the environment can be part of the path of least resistance. You will see small voltages across your house depending on what loads are on and there will be load-dependent noise conducted and radiated everywhere. This also puts the system one open circuit away from making nearly every conductive part of your house a shock hazard (if the wrong place in the ground network goes open circuit).
What is done in modern times is to have the current return on a neutral wire then monitor the ground wire for current and open the circuit when current is flowing back through ground (a fault).
Returning current through ground is impossible in Europe anyway due to residual current breakers. More than 30mA and the whole system shuts down.
And none of the light switches have ground either by the way.
Try putting a 50 mA fault and see if the GFCI does anything. It won't if you don't have a second line for return current.
This is different from ground. Neutral is the way the return is meant to go. Ground is a safety feature. Connected to the enclosure in some devices.
So sockets here have 3 wires: Live (Brown), Neutral (Blue) and Ground (Green with Yellow stripe). But the switches only have Live and the Switching wire (Black, the wire that goes to the light). The light then receives the switching wire and has Neutral. Because the power is consumed in the light and returns via neutral.
The switch doesn't need the neutral normally because it doesn't use any power. It just switches it on and off on the way to the light. But the wifi switchboxes do need it because they need to remain connected even when the switch is off.
Though I’ll admit, it might be worth the hassle if you have guests often or many people living at your place.
https://www.home-assistant.io/integrations/flux/
This works with almost any smart light you can get connected to HA (most smart lights have white balance adjust), it's brand agnostic etc. I have lights from several different vendors working together this way.
Look at this stuff as "progressive enhancement". Make the simple things work, then build on top of that. Don't replace the simple things with complicated, elaborate things. You don't want to live without lights for a week because a SD card died in a Raspberry Pi somewhere or something.
The overly complicated setup I'm using to run my smart home automation stuff shit the bed and I was too busy with work to really spend the time fixing it so... I just didn't. For six months. The only major complaint I heard was that the outside lighting was no longer turning itself on and off with the sun.
Even in the worst case scenario, all of the lights still have switches that can be turned on and off as long as there's power. It's all zwave, and I've made use of the scenes / direct associations / etc such that most of the stuff people actually care about happens without being mediated by Home Assistant. Or requiring any sort of network. When I move out of this house, I could leave it all behind and it would keep working as-is without my server, access point, active internet connection, or anything else. If there's power, it works.
All my living room lights (three dimmers) are controlled by a single dimmer.
The three way switches in our bedroom are now dimmers. One controls the lights, the other acts as a remote control for it.
The pantry light turns itself off after 20 minutes because people always forget it on.
Both the kitchen light switches turn on and off with the single, easily accessible switch.
The switch for the porch lights also turns the string lights on the gazebo a hundred feet from the house on and off.
My kid's too small to reach the regular switches, so there's a battery-powered remote switch mounted on the wall at her height in her bedroom and the bathroom. Those still work and are still able to dim the lights in her room.
Etc, etc. All without anything but electricity.
I said only _major_ complaint--my kid definitely had some complaints. We have one switch that has a couple of those RGB projector bulbs hooked up to it. When you turn that on, an automation turns off all the rest of the lights and starts playing some dance music. Her party lights still turned on, but it no longer made the music start.
If you want colour control then get smart bulbs to go downstream of your smart switches. Set them to always go to "on" when power's restored, and build that _on top_ with your automation. You'll always have a working light, your automation can always turn them on even when someone's turned the switch off like a normal person would, but when everything else is working you'll _also_ get colour control.