I suspect most people have one of two configurations:
Smart dimmers with dumb bulbs.
Smart bulbs - that are always powered - hence are controlled directly.
With dumb bulbs I see the value, that you need a smart switch anyway, so you may as well buy one that also supports dimming....
However what about the case where the bulbs are always powered and all control is done directly from HA (in my case via Zigbee).
I currently have at least 2 scenes for every room (Bright and Evening) if required I could add more scenes, so I could have 100%, 80% 60% brightness and so on.
Then I can simply bind up/down buttons on scene switches to cycle the scenes.
So my question to those that have dimmers is, do you really use them or if you were forced to pick say 3 brightness levels (on a per room basis) would you feel you had missed out on something?
The reason for my question is I am trying to figure out if its worth buying and going down the rabbit hole of Zigbee dimmers, or if it's likely that they just wouldn't get used.
Hi David, you have to ask yourself how many times/often you manually change the brightness of your lights and specifically the ones in question.
I'm dong this (adapting brightness) with automations for smart bulbs but of course you could additionally control them with a wall switch that has a dimmer module.
Over here, there are still physical switches present but those are not used anymore; to give you an idea about using physical light switches and that if automated 'the right way' this can be done without user interaction (and the need for switches/dimmers)
Currently zero - because I have an automation that switches from Bright to Evening around sunset time and I don't own any dimmers.
At the moment I just can't come up with a reason to need dimmers, but I am wondering if I am missing something (I didn't think presence sensors would be as useful as they turned out to be).
You could get a cheap button-type scene remote and play around to get the feel if you really need dedicate dimmers. Worst case scenario if you don't find it useful is that you can repurpose it for practically anything, even if it's just a handy way to control devices without opening up HA.
I'm using a Philips Hue Tap Dial right now for something similar. It's not exactly cheap at 50Eur, but I got it on offer & it's got enough buttons (plus that rotary dial) to make it useful enough for casual use.
I do neither, i have smart bulbs (brightness, color, color temp) w/ smart switches. Some smart switches are set to “smart bulb mode” and keep the bulbs always on. other smart switches act like normal switches and kill the power to the smart bulb.
Automations keep everything in sync and 99% of the time brightness, color, color temp are all the same based off sunrise/sunset and midnight but i also have automations that change brightness, color, color temp from the ambient sound in the room. That last 1% is magical.
ultimately “useful” comes down to what it is what you’re trying to do.
if you can already do what you want to do with the devices, you already have the answer is… no, they probably won’t get used... in your use case.