Decoupled / wireless mode of the Aqara Wall Switches - 2023 Latest

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Hi everyone,

After spending a number of years using Samsung SmartThings (ST) extensively, I’ve finally decided to adopt Home Assistant (HA) to work around the limitations on ST.

Now I know that this topic has come up a number of times, but after extensive searching both here and generally online I’m still unable to get a clearly defined answered and ideally a solution.

At the most basic, simple level…:

I have an Aqara H1 wall switch. Single rocker, no neutral.

I’m using a WiFi based smart bulb to the circuit controlled by the H1 wall switch. I wish to use automation to perform actions on the bulb, rather than using the switch to physically disconnect / connect the power to the light bulb socket. I believe this is called “decoupled” mode within the HA community. Within the ST community it was called “wireless mode”. I want to point out that the community made driver for the Aqara switches fully supported this “wireless mode” / “decoupled mode” operation in ST.

My ultimate goal is for the light bulb socket to be powered on at all times, and any action regarding the light bulb itself (e.g. on, off) is all performed based on actions defined in HA and trigged by a press / double press of the button on the Aqara H1 wall socket.

Currently I’m using Home Assistant Green with the SkyConnect dongle, although I’m looking at moving some of these over to using HomeKit instead (I don’t own anything Apple, I mean HomeKit solely on HA).

Can someone, anyone give any solid news on this? I’ve heard so many different “solutions”, some of which are years old, some of which apparently work for some but not for others. Other people say it’s impossible. Others mention a requirement to use zigbee2mqtt over ZHA. I’ve heard that the best support is provided by using he Xiaomi Gateway (Aqara) integration, but this literally states that “decoupled mode” doesn’t work and isn’t supported. (See here under “Unsupported devices”): Xiaomi Gateway (Aqara) - Home Assistant (home-assistant.io)

Given that the hardware is capable of doing what people are asking, and we have THE open home automation platform on the planet, can we get a solid answer as to how we can make this work?

I’m purposefully creating this as a new topic due to out of date existing posts and improvements to firmware, HA and the general march of time.

Thanks in advance for your time reading and hopefully for your help :slight_smile:

Side note: Being fairly new to the HA scene (but fairly advanced with home automation in general through my SmartThings use) I’m comfortable with using Lovelace, and happy to configure YAML but I’m not familiar with the pairing of YAML and HA. I’m currently making the transition from ST to HA and this will take me some time to do, so I’m happy to act as a guinea pig / alpha/beta tester in this.

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Welcome to the community. :grin:

Since you have SkyConnect, would it not be simpler to use Zigbee to control the wall switch, with a dumb bulb in the light? Or a Zigbee bulb with a battery-powered zigbee switch (you might be able to bind these so that they continue working even when HA is down)?

There’s a thread on GitHub where some people appear to have got “decoupled mode” working. But someone has added:

It’s worth pointing out for anyone coming across this issue, that the no-neutral version does not work well with decoupled mode if it’s being used to toggle a smart bulb on the same electrical loop. As soon as the bulb is toggled off there’s not enough power going through the switch to keep it connected, and it just drops off the network until the bulb is toggled on again.

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It does look like z2m supports decoupled mode. Grab a second dongle and test z2m to confirm. You can run z2m and zha concurrently while testing, but they will be two separate networks.

It surprises me ZHA device supports still lags z2m as much as it does. I thought it would improve when I switched to z2m two years ago.

@Stiltjack’s linked comment about possible issues with smart bulbs on the no neutral switch are valid, but likely very bulb dependent. If it worked with ST, it should work just as well with z2m.

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Welcome!

Not sure if this is helpful or not, I am on zigbee2mqtt not zha. I echo what others say and recommend zigbee2mqtt over zha, I ran both for several years and the function, support, community and devices add/fix by devs is much better.

In the ‘way back’ machine, I too ran SmartThings hub, their zigbee work was outstanding at the time. Zigbee2MQTT has now become the leader in ‘open’ zigbee work.

I have one of these no-neutral Aqara switched working well with zigbee2mqtt, link below. As I say not 100% in line with what I think your config will be, I have one of the buttons controlling a pair of LED bulbs directly and the second switch in ‘decoupled’ mode controlling three zigbee bulbs, 2 Cree, 1 Singled. Configuring the two switches was easy in zigbee2mqtt. The switch is connect to routers, not directly to coordinator.

While I do not have any switches in production that require ‘bypass’ capacitors, this can be a need for some no neutral devices.

FYI, if you are planning a larger number of devices in your setup, I highly recommend the following for testing:

As I said, move to zigbee2mqtt outside of Home Assistant using docker containers

Add a 2nd test zigbee2mqtt network using a second dongle and docker container to test new devices ‘off’ your main zigbee network.

Get a Cliff Quicktest

A box of Wago connectors
https://www.amazon.com/Lever-Nuts-Connectors-Assortment-221-2411-Splicing/dp/B0BTDSS6HQ

A ‘Wattsup’ type test meter
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08GSPLZBN/

Grounded Single Outlet Power Adapter with Illuminated On/Off Rocker Switch
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CLH7QR8S/?th=1

Simple lamp socket that you can cut and wire in to your test circuits with Wagos
https://www.amazon.com/DiCUNO-Extension-Hanging-Lantern-Polarized/dp/B0986K4RC4/?th=1

One ‘old school’ 60 watt incandescent bulb for calibrating various power monitoring zigbee power metering plugs.

One ‘new school’ low wattage good quality ‘dumb’ LED bulb to check need for bypass caps and check for flickering, dimming.

Note: make sure to not leave your test socket and bulb laying on your bench for long period of ‘on’ testing. It does get hot, even LED bulbs, from experience :wink:

Good hunting!

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Thanks everyone - that’s super useful.

I have indeed moved from ZHA to Z2MQTT which looks like it will resolve the issue. Real shame that it doesn’t work out of the box with ZHA - I held off buying into HA due to maturity of the project. Working as an IT consultant playing with YAML, MQTT and CLI work is my spare time is a bit of a busman’s holiday if you know what I mean. Brought the HA Green for this very reason but alas I can’t have it all!

Just as an FYI the WiFi smart bulbs are existing ones I had long before I got into using ST. Kids wanted cool colours so just brought the Meross lights which worked fine. Was only when I got into more advanced home automation I wanted to ensure that the lights were powered off when nobody was in the room automatically so needed a sensor which being Zigbee needed a hub and before you know it I’m using ST, and eventually ended up in this situation!

Thanks again. For anyone else in my situation, setting the Zigbee2MQTT was the solution, although compared to the simplicity of ZHA and HACS services like Tado it’s one of the harder things to get working properly… But does appear to be worth it.

Thanks - Steve

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Thanks again everyone.

Whilst I got it working as described in these wonderful posts above with Z2M, after doing my first ever upgrade of HA from version 2013.11.x to 2013.12.x the whole decoupled mode feature no longer works at all.

I’ve seen others with the same issue and have reported it’s a bug between the 2013.12.x release and Zigbee2MQTT.

Have thrown in the towel for now as the only solution I’ve read so far as is to roll back to a prior release (2013.11.x) which I’d really rather not do.

Thanks again to everyone for their help - really great to see such a fantastic community on my first ever post! :smiley:

Cheers and Merry Christmas,

Steve

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From what I’ve read, it has nothing to do with HA 2023.12, but rather the 1.34 December z2m release. It is fixed in the z2m dev branch, so temporarily changing to the z2m edge addon should fix it.

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