I’ve been renovating my home and have run cat6 throughout and created a nice little network. I’ve dabbled with smart bulbs and have some Philips hue.
After seeing some videos I’ve been intrigued by home automation and it’s overwhelming! I was looking at installing some Shelly’s and start by making one room automated via home assistant. The trouble I have is that in this old house the back boxes on switches are very shallow. This means Shelly’s would be a nightmare to use unless it’s a rewired room where we have deeper back boxes.
Are there other solutions I could look at? I’m wondering if my best option is just to stick with using hue bulbs and accept I can’t have switches operating as part of HA.
For each room you really have to make a choice - smart bulb or smart switch.
I started my homeassistant journey before there were any decent switches that could be operated without a neutral, so I went the smart bulb route for the whole house by default.
It works fine, just find an innovative and aesthetically pleasing way to cover the ‘hard’ switches and in the rooms you actually need switches put in a zigbee one (hue tap, hue switch, xiaomi button etc)
This method also gives you the added bonus of a nice fallback if homeassistant goes down for some reason. Just uncover the ‘hard’ switches and revert back to the 20th century method until fixed, then cover the switches again.
Of course if you prefer the smart switch method, you can (I believe) put things like shelley in the ceiling between the switch and the light, rather than trying to shoehorn them into the back box of the switch.