Hi everyone,
I recently installed a new chandelier in my living room and would love to integrate it properly into Home Assistant. At the moment it is just controlled by a regular wall switch, but I feel like I am missing out on a lot of potential when it comes to automation.
I am interested in making it smarter in a way that actually feels useful in daily life, not just automated for the sake of it. Things like adjusting brightness depending on the time of day, turning on automatically in certain situations, or integrating it into scenes sound great, but I am not sure what works best in real homes.
If you have automated a chandelier or main ceiling light, I would really appreciate hearing how you approached it, what hardware you used, and whether there were any issues along the way. Any practical advice or real world experience would be very helpful.
Chandeliers are pretty, but at the end of the day they are just a fancy light globe (or globes) to switch, dim, or change color, same as any other light fitting.
Of course, if yours is motorised to effect movement, added controls are needed.
Otherwise the only issues are space taken, weight for support and maintenance, possible electrical shielding if too much metal, and power consumption.
You will find that choosing what form of connection to your home automation will ultimately affect your satisfaction. Do you go WiFi, ZigBee, Thread/Matter, BlueTooth or some other networking to send your commands? How reliable will it be? How fast will it respond? Will I have to climb up on a ladder to reset anything? How often will this technology to control your light get updated, given there is changes to HomeAssistant on a weekly and monthly cycle? Will WAF issues be critical, especially if it dominates your living space and is mainly there for the wow factor?
I have a tiny chandelier above my dining room table. I installed smart bulbs as the lights. I keep the main switch on and placed above it a zigbee button to turn on/off and adjust brightness (long story short, this switch doesn’t have a neutral wire, which is why I keep it on and use a zigbee button). I use the HACS Adaptive Lighting integration to adjust the brightness and color temp throughout the day. My dining room is literally the center area of my house, so a lot of traffic passes through the room. My wife likes the smart bulbs in it because we can make the colors festive for the seasons/holidays should we have a reason to.
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