soo, i wanted to convert all my light switches to smart switches (i want to make my smart home guest proof), and the only cost effective option thats compliant in my area is aqara h2 wall switch (you can get them with 1-3 relays). the switch is zigbee/thread, and can turn relays on/off via HA. im using zigbee mode (z2m).
all is great, but i can only do on/off, not brightness or color temp change. is there anyway i can combine this with a smart bulbs to be able to adjust brightness/temp (zigbee, thread or wifi?)?
before anyone suggests, I can run the switches in decoupled mode and use them as just a button with smart lights - but this would mean if HA is ever down, the buttons wouldnt do anything. so its not very guest proof.
if i use zigbee smart bulbs, im afraid it will cause chaos on the zigbee network as the routers keep going on/off often. (maybe i can run a 2nd network?)
Unless you require color or temperature control, smart bulbs are the expensive option. I have a few Z-Wave dimmer switches that control cheap, dumb LED bulbs. I also have a couple of Ikea smart bulbs, and I haven't ever changed the color or temperature since installing them in the living room lamps years ago.
I did the same. As for color temperature: I do not know where you live and if they are available there, but Philips sells lights under the Warm Glow label. They are dumb leds. When you turn up the brightness they use colder light, when you dim down they use warm light. That way they mimic old fashioned bulbs, which feels very natural.
You're asking the age old question of bulbs v switch.
I'm a switch guy. If I need to give you a manual for the home it's wrong.
buy switches that supports decoupled mode
use switches unless you need color.
switch switch to decoupled and install a smart bulb when you need color but realize it won't work when ha is down and accept it
Yes this is exactly what I do except additionally I only install smart bulbs in table lamps where it's hard to reach the switch and it's obviously ambient. - AND sensor the hell out of the place so nobody ever touches a switch.
You pretty much already know the limitations. You don't power cut a smart bulb. It's just picking the right combination for your install now.
I dislike fully decoupled mode because I want lights to work when HA is down.
I prefer z-wave over zigbee because of associations. when buttons are decoupled or when I use battery remotes, they are associated with the smart dimmer/light. That way they also work without the coordinator and provide smooth dimming.
Zigbee has similar functionality but it is not widely supported, often hard to set up (especilly with ZHA), may differ among brands, may or may not work together with HA as coordinator and worst: sometimes relies on proximity to couple, leading to coupling the wrong switch at times. Z-wave associations are widely supported, always compatible and easy to set up. HA keeps full control over the light too.
I often use 4 button remotes for one light: two associated buttons for on off and dimming, and the other two for HA created scenes.Those may fail if HA is down.
At the end of the day if there is a tech that does everything you need when Home Assistant is down, then you don't need Home Assistant.
Otherwise you either have to accept degraded functionality (in some scenarios) or make some other compromise.
I won't repeat the other suggestions in this thread (they are good suggestions).
Instead I will give you some more "extreme" options - likely you would only use these for specific cases:
Use non router smart bulbs - will disrupt your Zibgee network less than router changes would.
Have multiple circuits/switches containing bulbs with different color temperatures.
Leave dumb switches in place you can still turn lights on/off when HA is down.
Can use IR sensors when in smart mode.
Or you can double up the switches (smart and dumb) .
Yes i absolutely agree @NathanCu, if i need to give a manual for a guest, im doing it wrong. But that said, if the house stops functioning (EVER), i personally think im doing it wrong too.
My rule is that, "smart" should be additional, and intuitive to non tech people. So... No manuals. Things should work as expected from a normie perspective (your gramdma should be able to operate the house). Its perfectly ok for grandma to not be able to operate complex parts of the house, but she should be able to operate the basics ... ALWAYS (even if HA is down - its ok if its not 100%, but most things should be working always). So if i were to write it into rules:
Basic/critical operations of the house should be grandma proof without manual
Basic/critical operations of the house should ALWAYS work (reguardless of the status of HA or any other cloud/network status - it is ok for some parts of the house to be slightly degraded, but should still be usable).
So decoupled mode breaks Rule 2 - unless there is some way i can make the decoupled mode revert back to relay mode if HA is not running for example (but i dont think thats an option).
For my light brightness/temp requirement, i dont need to actively change brightness/temp all the time. Its ok for that functionality to be slightly degraded, i only need that so i can tweak and dial in each rooms brightness/temp to the best value for that room.
That said, heres what im mainly thinking:
Is there a way i can have Zigbee Smart Bulbs act as a non router devices? Meaning that i can add them to a zigbee network, cut power on/off with switch, but when they are online, i can change brightness/temp. Biggest problem is if the light is a router unit, then when its offline (switch cuts power), some of the non router units like sensors may have connected to that light bulb and is expecting the bulb to be there - thus making the entire zigbee network degraded (ive already experienced this when i had some smart bulbs manually turned off by accident).
What if i run most of my smart home on zigbee, but have the bulbs in thread? So cutting power will not affect the zigbee network, and when the bulbs come online the brightness/temp is adjustable.
What if the bulbs run on a 2nd zigbee network? Can i even do that with a single zigbee dongle?
What if i buy bulbs in a different type, like: wifi/bluetooth/rf?
I should also clarify that i live in New Zealand, and not a lot of smart switches have been certified for NZ (i can still install anything, but electrician may not want to install it due to risk in license, and that also causes a potential insurance nightmare). I was happy to see Aqara recently in NZ, so i jumped at their H2 switches. These switches cannot control brightness, but can run in decoupled mode. For most part, they work really well. The switch supports both Zigbee and Thread.
Otherwise, my house is unexpectedly an Aqara showroom, full if aqara T1/T2 bulbs, sensors, etc haha. So its not a big stretch for me to buy an aqara hub, connect up all the smart bulbs to the aqara hub and connect bad to HA through that, while keeping the switches in HA directly via zigbee2mqtt.
I personally would rather not add zwave to the mix. but i would consider thread as 80% of my smart home supports thread, and 99% of my smart home supports zigbee (all the 75% thread devices support both zigbee and thread).
Note: My responses are for the US - I know nothing about the NZ market.
I have not seen any switchable (router/non-router) bulbs.
However some manufactures make non-router bulbs - I can confirm that my Sengled bulbs don't route.
Two networks is trivial (ZHA + Z2M).
You would require two dongles - but they are not expensive, additionally you may choose an ethernet coordinator to place it in a separate location.
The bigger problem is going to be maintaining two meshes - in my case with one network it's easy to forget the range issues with Zigbee - it's not a problem when every room contains a router.
I had a need to fire up my old ZHA network specifically for 1 device (everything else is Z2M) I am restricted in placement for that 1 device to a few meters from the dongle - you may struggle to maintain 2 healthy meshes.
Switchable no. But Osram intentionally do not make thier bulbs route for this very reason. And why I pick theirs. All af my bulbs aren’t routers and if someone accidentally turns it off my mesh doesn’t care.
I just so happen to have a whole bunch of Aqara zigbee bulbs. And the reason for this potential 2nd network is not to actively adjust brightness/temp all the time, but to once in a blue moon to tweak the brightness/temp to suite the room (set it and forget it). So, what im thinking is to have the 2nd network not through Z2M or ZHA, but to use something like an aqara hub (because most of my bulbs just so happen to be aqara, and aqara devices seems to have a nice balance between cost to performance - atleast based on whats available for us here).
Im going to assume that if i connect bulbs to an aqara hub directly, there must be some way to connect that devices back to HA through some aqara integration? [again, not a big deal if this part goes through cloud as it serves a non critical function]
I havent really done in depth testing on zigbee range, how bad is zigbee range? I generally never had a big issue, other than when i added shit aliexpress zigbee router devices - then everything just stopped working reliably (i assume those cheap devices were dropping messages that caused the entire network to fall apart).
Actually on another note, does thread help me on this at all? If the smart bulbs happen to be on a thread network, is that any better than a 2nd zigbee network? Basically, does thread network get affected much when powered devices like bulbs gets disconnected often? Does thread have a similar concept to a "router" device (for a bulb), and if so, can that be adjusted for a bulb to not be a router device?
Someone briefly mentioned Zigbee binding, but this situation depends on the bulb and the switch, and how you set them up.
A common thing to do if you have a Zigbee bulb and a Zigbee switch is to decouple the switch from the load (so the load always has power) and bind the switch to the bulb. This setup makes it so the bulb is always powered, while the switch sends Zigbee commands to the bulb to turn on and off. And since this works at the Zigbee level, the switch will continue to send commands not only if Home Assistant is down, but also if the Zigbee coordinator is down! You can still control the bulb and switch through Home Assistant with this setup. And doing it this way should also alleviate your concern about the Zigbee network, because the bulbs stay powered all the time like any other router.
Said differently, instead of having the communication be: Zigbee switch -> Zigbee2MQTT -> Home Assistant -> Zigbee2MQTT -> Zigbee bulb. You have the communication be: Zigbee switch -> Zigbee bulb.
The caveats for your specific situation is that Aqara is known to not be fully compliant with the Zigbee spec for some (maybe all?) of their devices. So you'd want to do some research into how the H2s work with this setup, or try it out in the small if you have the time and money to spare.
You can, but it's a manual process which you might not like. If HA goes down for an extended period of time, manually reset the switches & they'll default to relay mode.
To be clear, you'll have to re-pair them to HA once it comes back up. However it's better than not having any lights & you only need to reset the most useful ones.
Googling says 10-20 meter after you account for walls and furniture.
My issue was probably because of the coordinator - I used to use a Sonoff USB Dongle - it never scored particularly well on the LQI metric - it wasn't a big issue for me, because it was only about 1 meter from a Phillips Hue Bulb, hence that became the first hop to most other devices and hue bulbs scored really well on LQI.
I switched to Z2M using a connect ZBT-2 and moved all but one device to that - I never had any issue on the Z2M network.
So my ZHA "network" is now just a Sonoff coordinator and a Sonoff (SNZB-02WD IP65) temperature sensor, that combination is unable to pass through 1 wall - though it manages one glass window - again I suspect if I added 1 Hue bulb to the ZHA network, it would probably be fine.
I'd say take that info with a pinch of salt & plan to halve the lower limit for an indoor environment. Did some digging and seems all the research is based of this table from 2017, which clearly states the tests were performed in an open space (probably in a lab environment). Somehow, that got translated (by sources such as this one) to mean that 10-20m is an effective range in an indoor environment.
I'm not saying it's impossible to achieve, but that range is extremely dependent on the number of walls & floors & the material they're built with, before you even factor in interference & antenna build on both the coordinator & the end device(s).
I've personally had luck getting my coordinator to speak to a door sensor 1 (concrete) floor down & through multiple 19cm brick walls, but even then I've had to get a few routing bulbs in my stairway. Even at the lowest estimate, 10m is 3 floors, building wise. At the end of the day, I'm never going to expect my coordinator to reach my washroom 2 floors up directly without getting multiple routers involved.
What I like about mesh networks is that they're self-healing when a router goes down on the network. As long as there are other routers nearby, end-devices tend to pick a new parent relatively quickly (at least on 3.0) and routes are redrawn. Older devices, of course, tend to lag in this regard. That's not to say disruptions won't or can't occur; or that an end-device won't take longer to choose a parent. The tech isn't infallible. But in my working experience, it's a moot point as long as you have setup the network with plenty of routers to compensate. Between that and understanding the limitations, you can prepare for the worst-case-scenarios and align them with your preferences.
For example, I have a home built in the 70's. Plenty of my lights have the old school pull chord hard switch for on/off. I place router bulbs in them, keep them powered 24/7 and use buttons for on/off. If any disruption should occur, I'm content in knowing I can "pull the chord" to turn the light on/off. I always leave analog control over my smart devices when I can as a fail-safe. If someone, like a guest, uses the chord, that's okay. It's happened. I've plenty of other routers to help reroute the network. I, also, have an automation using the sensor for devices_offline and will receive a notification within minutes when a device goes down or off the network.
No offence, but i feel like either you seem to have your zigbee network always running on "Happy Path" or im doing something wrong. What you explained is not even close to what my experience has been like. Ive been using HA/Zigbee for few years now, have about 100 odd devices on the zigbee network. Ive had to constantly remove/replace unreliable devices because either they drop packets, or constantly misbehaving etc. Even now with a house full of mostly aqara/hue gear, if i accidentally turn off some of the routing devices, i will most definitely experience plenty of issues. The theory of "self healing mesh network" BS is what i brought into, but in reality is just a black box where each device does what ever the heck it wants (no healings involved), and within the chaos things "often" works.
Well... tbf... I've gone the extra mile and done my due diligence in ensuring my zigbee network is always "happy" lol. What I mean by that is my Wi-Fi router/AP's are all on channels that will not interfere with or affect my zigbee channel. Zigbee channel 25 and my Wi-Fi uses channels 1 and 6. That's probably the most important thing I've done and it made a world of a difference. I've also uploaded custom firmware on a couple of zigbee devices so they're less chatty. I've done other things that help my Wi-Fi mesh, which may have inadvertently helped my Zigbee mesh, like lower the transmit power to 6 dBm on the radios. But yea, my Zigbee network is rock solid.