Thanks for the thoughts. That’s a good point re ease of replacement/upgrade of the Shellys, hadn’t considered that.
If Shelly had a rotary control option, I would 100% go with Option 2. But I still really like having rotary control for my dimmers, so I started to switch to Mercator dimmers for my dimmable lights.
I started with the smart home stuff years ago, when there were only a few options. I still have a bunch of lights on Fibaro dimmers with bell press mechs. As soon as I found out there were rotary options available, I switched my most used lights over to these.
Hi Markroly, Old thread, but I have the exact same question and wondering if you managed to find a good solution? After a simple wall mounted thermostat that is easy to integrate into HA without having to write a lot of code. thanks in advance. Stuart
Can anyone recommend a good sparky who services inner SE Melbourne? For the smart lighting upgrade I mentioned about 20 posts above, so a sizeable job. Ideally someone who is familiar with Shelly products - don’t need help on the software side, but I figure familiarity with the product will likely make the install quicker / simpler.
Hi @Stuart124
Yes, I ended up going with a Venstar thermostat.
They work exactly like a normal thermostat with buttons and a screen, but they are wifi-connected and feature a local API (And can optionally be cloud connected, but it’s not mandatory). There is also a HomeAssistant integration that allows local control.
I enquired of an Australian Venstar stockist, who advised that as they operate at below 110VAC or 50VDC, then Australian electrical certification is not required.
I’ve been using my Venstar T2000 for about 4 years now and it hasn’t skipped a beat.
Hey guys moved into a new house recently and there was a tuya switch/relay already installed. The switch itself works ok and I can get it to blink with 9 quick taps of the button but the tuya app doesnt find it. Does anyone know how to get it into slow blink mode?
That manual you linked to says:
If smart device does not automatically
start blinking, hold down the button
until it flashes
yeah, Ive tried that and I get 0 blinks
Is it really a model “21322”?
Just a quick update. I got it to pair first go using an iPhone. Its not playing nicely with local tuya which is a shame. Using the tuya app I can turn it on and off and it changes state in the local tuya intergration, but trying to control it with local tuya doesnt work and always seems to be unavalible.
I have a fair few Tuya devices that show intermittently unavailable in Local Tuya, but will show available in the Tuya integration. As a work around I list both Local and Cloud entities in automations or Node Red and put repeats in place to ensure they get the on or off signal.
Yeah, thats what I was thinking. 
Personally I swapped from LocalTuya to TuyaLocal a while back. It seems to me that TuyaLocal has more stable connectivity, but is not as feature rich.
I swapped all but one of my Arlec PC191HA power switches to ESPHome, and would love to swap my other two tuya devices to ESPHome and get rid of Tuya alltogether. Unfortunately Tuya devices are cheap and easily available
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You can still buy Tuya devices just make sure that they are not Tuya WiFi as they are the ones that give the most headaches in these situations where we want full local control, when they are the zigbee versions they can be used stand alone without their apps and cloud services.
Hey all. I’ve got a hot water system that’s connected to my fusebox with a timer on it. I’m not very electrical, but it kinda looks like this:
The idea is that we have it linked up to our electricity between 10-3 so it’ll use power from our solar system, but if it’s too cloudy/whatever, it’ll just be powered with normal electricity. The other day was the first time we’ve ever run out of hot water since moving here (we DID use a lot of water that day, and knew we used a lot, so we weren’t surprised that it happened), but we did have to go and manually turn on the timer earlier than usual so it would start up and heat our water for us.
Is there something that’s HA compatible that would work in a similar way with the timer, but then also have a button in HA I could press if I need to manually turn it on if we ever think we’re using a lot of water so we don’t run out of hot water again?
Thanks in advanced!
If it was me I would go ‘all-in’ with HA and wire a relay / contactor in place of the timer and get ESPhome and HA to control the whole thing. With ESPhome you could still have a physical button for local control if you wanted.
That sounds pretty good - how would I go about that? Like what would I need to tell the electrician when they come around to get things installed, and what would I need to get beforehand to make it all happen? ESPhome sounds like it might be the way since it can be locally controlled, but what’s the reliability of it? Does it matter how much power the hot water system draws? Sorry if these are simple questions, I don’t know anything when it comes to this type of stuff
Get the sparky to install one of these (or similar) in place of the timer. This will fit in the same space so won’t be any trouble. By getting one with a 12V dc coil you can then have the coil wired out to a box next to your meterbox and it will only have a safe extra low voltage in it which you can then play with yourself without needing a sparky.
Then you would also need an ESP and a small relay to control the 12V to the contactor. If you get a 240Vac to 12V dc power supply (only needs to be small) wired in to provide 12V dc to your ESP control box you then also need 5Vdc for the ESP itself. Jaycar actually have a nice power supply that will handle both of these for you. Although you could also just use a 12V supply and a small convertor which can also be purchased even cheaper from AliExpress if you can wait. Also need an ESP, I would get an ESP32 so it can double as a Bluetooth Proxy.
For me it’s been great. I’ve had it controlling my bore pump and irrigation in a similar manner to what you would do for your hot water for a number of years now, no troubles at all.
The above contactor would be more than enough but your sparky could check the hot water unit. Or, just look at what size circuit breaker currently feeds it… less than 25A, you are good with the above.
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