I’m personally not a fan of the flat glass style switches. I’ve therefore got a combination of following:
- Hue bulbs
- The live and switched live are joined together so its always on. I’ve then replaced the switch with a 3d printed hue remote holder, so its nice and flush with the wall and looks neat.
- However, they’re expensive and if you’ve got more than 3 in a room it gets costly quickly.
- Also, I’ve found some of the bulbs/remotes on the 1st floor dont all respond to commands - for example I have 6 gu10 downlights and occasionally, one will decide not to dim or turn off, or the remote just wont work. Not every time, but annoying when it does.
- Xiaomi light switches with dumb bulbs
- Specifically the no neutral version.
- Requires a xiaomi hub, but this integrates nicely w/ HA and you can block the gateway on your router if you’re worried about it calling home to Xiaomi’s Chinese servers - it needs access to add devices, but then can be blocked and works fine w/ HA. I actually use the hub as a speaker for some of my automations and the gateway light as a nightlight in the hallway (if the motion sensor detects movement in the hallway and its after sunset and the hallway lights are off, itll turn on a nice dim purple light for a few mins).
- About £20 for a switch from aliexpress, so pretty good value for money and they come as single or double
- I really like the design of them and the feel when you press the buttons, but its not to everyones liking.
- They’re not designed to be used in a 2 way/3 way circuit. My hallway has two lights and 2x two way switches, so each light can be controlled from each switch. I’ve gotten around this by changing both switches to xiaomi, having the first paddle on switch 1 control the closest light and the second paddle remotely trigger switch 2 and vice versa. As it’s not turning the light on via the electrical wire, it results in a short delay for the remote light, but it does work (delay can vary from <1s to a few seconds if it’s a bad day).
- You can also add stick on battery powered switches which could do the same thing (or control anything via homeassistant) and these look identical to the powered wall switches
- Z-Wave switch behind the original switch - specifically the Aeotec Nano **dimmer (NOT switch)**
- This allows you to keep your existing switches and bulbs
- Need to use with an aeotec z-stick or something similar
- Expensive at £50 a pop + the z-stick cost.
- Can be used in a 2-way setup where the device will detect when either switch has been toggled and then turn the light on or off.
- Lots of control over how the light turns on/off - mine go from 0 to 100% over 1s rather than instant. However, this means it can be quite complicated to set up what should be an extremely simple task!
- There is a v. short (0.5s) delay from flicking the switch to it starting to turn on/off
There is now also finally Den switches, which are normal looking UK switches but will physically flip up or down when turned on or off remotely. However, they were plagued by delays even getting the first batches of the product out and have no firm plans for API access as far as I’m aware. Also, they are £40-£85 (depending on how many gang you need) and they need their own hub (£90) - this is the dealbreaker for me.