Hi everyone! I’m new here and very excited to make my home smarter!
Now that we’re on the Black Friday week, I’m going to spend some money to equip my home with cool stuff, but as I’m new to this (especially with Home Assistant) I have a few questions:
As we want to have different colours and strengths in our lights, the only reliable brand I found was Hue… I’m going to need 18 bulbs for my living room/kitchen so this is going to be quite expensive… Any better recommendation?
We also want to have wall-mount wired smart switches, thinking of buying 6 so I can use the lights from the wall the same way we have it configured now (on rows of 3). As Hue doesn’t provide any switch like this, can I be sure with Home Assistant it should be ok as soon as it has connectivity with Google Home or the like? Is there anything specific I should look at so I’m sure the switch will work even if the WiFi is down? Any extra recommendations are welcomed too!
We’re buying also blinds and Nest doorbell so quite excited to be able to use all the automation this platform provides!
Not because you can control the switch from Google Assistant that you can control it from Home Assistant. Best bet is to buy Zigbee or Z-wave switches.
Do not use SMART bulbs and SMART switches on the same circuit unless your bulbs and switches are designed to be used in this manner. (For instance, Zwave bulbs with a zwave switch that can turn off load control and then connected by Zwave Direct Association) Smart bulbs MUST always have power to operate correctly and most Smart bulbs that use Zigbee or Zwave (Hue is a special case Zigbee) repeat for other devices ont he network because it’s part of the spec. Turning the bulb on and off not only makes it hard to control - but reallly messes with your radio mesh and in rare cases can actually damage the bulb. Just dont.
Bulb OR switch. not both. Yes that means you need to figure out another option for color control in those circuits.
Yes, if you don’t choose a wifi operated device or if oyu use a wifi device it needs to be capable of using something like local Tasmota.
I prefer Zwave and Zigbee switches for this exact reason. My goto brands are Zooz, Innovelli and Jasco.
Oh… I spent yesterday half of the evening selling my wife how awesome would be to have colors and be able to control the lights from the wall in case you don’t want to rely on wifi being on
As you can see I’m quite a beginner on this matter… Thank you so much for the great info so far!
I had for some time some smart plugs and sometimes it was annoying to control with google or phone app as it was taking longer to turn them on than a switch on the wall…
How do you tackle this situation?
Another situation that already happened to me is that sometimes some person comes home and they don’t know about the smart bulb, so they press the regular switch which it’ll make the bulb to discionect.
I guess it cannot be THAT smart? or am I missing something here?
Yep. and in an effort to help you and everybody else about to buy a bunch of gear to keep from taking it back to the store the day after boxing day…
WIFI devices require solid WIFI network. If you r network is poor and devices on it will be poor as well.
Bluetooth is not a good home control platform (there are certain exceptions)
if you choose WIFI lighting / devices that use a ‘service’ (insert vendor’s app here.) chances are that stuff can connect to another service, (in this context HA is also a service, one that lives in your home) but that’s a cloud to cloud connection. Which means if the Internet goes out - you lose control. MOST people using HA use it to avoid this - therefore they use devices that are capable of local connection.
TO avoid this - ALWAYS prefer standards based gear. There are three or four industry standards floating around here you’ll hear that are al capable of doign local. Zigbee, Zwave and Tasmota (local) (You may also hear Thread and Matter - they’re good news and emerging standards but too early to buy gear…)
For Tasmota, pick Wifi gear you need to be able to use it with a local system. (Look and see if the device uses an ESP chipset and can be flashed with ‘tasmota’) For Zwave - you’re looking for Zwave Plus devices built within the last two years and prefer anything with a ‘7 series’ chip (the new one) over anything else. For Zigbee you’re looking for stuff that supports Zigbee 3.
MODEL NUMBER MATTERS. This stuff is very finicky… You may find a device where model 123 works a treat but model 123b does not. Research EVERYTHING you’re planning to add down to the model number before you buy it to make sure it will work. (Yes, I’m sorry I know black Friday is this week - you have a lot of studying to do…)
Zwave and Zigbee are NOT wifi. Each is its own mesh network that requires a ‘hub’ (or stick) in your HA box to control. Those networks require repeating devices every 20-50 feet (8-16m) for a solid connection. If you’re starting small (I STRONGLY RECCOMMEND IT) plan out one room with your hub and stick nearby - it sucks to troubleshoot a poorly performing mesh network right out of the gate.
That’s likely cloud lag - see item 3… It can be planned around but NEVER completely eliminated
. My voice automations are all in Alexa but they are triggers only - it’s designed to pass one command to HA as fast as possible to let it handle the heavy lifting.
Welcome to bulbs v. switches! BTW - This is a religious war in HA circles - welcome to the fight! I’m squarely a switches guy. This is just a less automated version of adding a smart switch on a smart bulb circuit. (You’ll either need to add something to your switch to prevent a power cut, talk to all your guests, or - go switches… (And adapt the bulbs accordingly.)
Thank you so much again for all the info provided!
I just got today an Asus router because the one I have I can feel it doesn’t behave very well with other devices even if they’re connected to the ethernet! So I hope that’ll be enough.
I saw a video of a guy on YouTube while having lunch saying that in order to get Hue working without going to the internet I’ll need a Zigbee dongle connected to my raspberry, but I can’t find any info about it on the official pages, it actually says only that it’ll be auto-discovered (which I assume that means it’ll still go to the internet) could you point me to somewhere do I can learn more about it?
I’m also finding it a bit hard to find what device uses what, especially in Amazon (in terms of the standards). anywhere that I could see a list of devices? I’m kinda inclined to take it easy and buy HUE first as in the Home Assistant page has a great score and usage, but seeing how many things I’ll be able to do with it, I’m starting to let my imagination go to automate as much as I can around the whole house
This is just a less automated version of adding a smart switch on a smart bulb circuit. (You’ll either need to add something to your switch to prevent a power cut, talk to all your guests, or - go switches… (And adapt the bulbs accordingly.)