Recently I bought a vacation house which for now became a test field for my renovation skills. Being a huge fan of everything smart-home-related, I decided to make my house smart.
I started with lightning. My idea for the setup is to use only smart light bulbs, presence sensors for controlling them and some wireless switches for necessary overrides. For smart light bulbs I chose IKEA TRÅDFRI which offer all of the features I’m looking for - light temperature control, dimming and hight CRI and also are quite reasonably priced with good availability in my region. For presence sensors I will be performing some testing of different products. Ideally I’m aiming at finding a good cheap one since I would require around 15 of them. For wireless switches I will be also performing some testing of different switches available on the market and same as with presence sensors - I’m looking for something with great value for money.
And here’s for the most controversial part of this plan - I’m planning to hardwire all of my smart lightbulbs. What I mean by this is that they will be connected directly to power without any hardware switch in between. The lightbulbs are going to be controlled mostly by presence sensors and in some cases the presence sensors will be overridden by wireless switches.
Has anyone of you tried such setup? What do you think about it?
My reasoning is that with lighting, you almost always want to turn it on when someone enters an area which is not bright enough. This part is covered by presence and light sensors - turning lights on and off depending on presence and brightness. A special case here are bedrooms which in my plan will have wireless buttons to override presence sensors.
There are many advantages to such solution:
Lightbulbs are always connected to power which let tem reliably act as Zigbee routers
Lightbulbs are always connected to power which doesn’t let users break my automations
Tenants don’t have to search for appropriate switches - the light just turns on magically
Non technical tenants have very shallow learning curve
Less cable runs and no concerns if I should put an additional switch here-and-there
My main concern with this idea is the reliability of such solution. Namely:
If my controller fails, I will not be able to control lightning
If all of a sudden I loose connection to any of my lightbulbs, I will not be able to control it
From your experience - how likely are those scenarios to happen? Is it going to be once a day, once a month, once a year situation? For my controller I’m going to use Home Assistant Green with SkyConnect which I assume should have fairly high reliability score.
Are there other disadvantages to such solution that I haven’t mentioned?
I’m very curious of your opinions and recommendations.
Well you can use rf control switches that don’t require light switch to be connected with a wire to the light. I have only one of those devices in my house. It is working, no problem at all. This is something like this, but there are various combinations. Some switches doesn’t even require battery and you can just stick it on the wall or where ever you want. This could be your backup solution if sensor or automation fail. Didn’t tried every option but it might work.
For reference, my description is for the North American electrical system.
I removed the existing two-pole switch, connected the two black wires together with a wirenut, then covered the junction box with a custom-built metal plate. It’s just sheet metal with two holes in the correct locations in order to attach the plate to the box (screwheads are countersunk slightly). Then I magnetically attached a Philips Remote Dimmer Switch directly over the metal plate.
Anyone entering the room can still operate the lights manually using the Philips remote switch which is located exactly where they would expect to find a light switch. However the lights can also be controlled by an automation driven by a schedule or motion. No one can accidentally cut power to the light bulbs because they’re now hardwired to the mains.
My suspicion is that this arrangement probably contravenes an electrical code or two so I am not endorsing it, only describing it. Whenever I sell my home, it all gets reverted to what it was.
EDIT
Regarding reliability, if you’re using Zigbee devices, you can pair the remote switch directly to the light bulbs so even if Home Assistant is offline, the command from the switch is received directly by the lights.
You could use any wireless button to control the lights.
Be aware that motion sensors are not suited for rooms where you sit still because the light will go off and if you are not alone, this might upset the other family members.
I use multiple motion sensors in the house, not in the living area or the bathroom.
Everything to work in the traditional way so when you go to sell the place you wouldn’t have issues - or when something doesn’t work, you don’t want a guest unable to sleep because the lights are stuck on, or the lights to turn off while your wife is in the shower, etc.
Everything then to also work via HA seamlessly - meaning - if lights are on - be able to turn them off via HA, and if they are off, be able to turn them on via HA. You can use normal switches with shelly relays behind them and have the relay treat the swircxh as “edge” - meaning, if the switch is in the off position, but the lights are on, then changing the physical light switch to the other position would actually turn the lights on - so no toggling is ever necessary. This is what @ferbulous meant I believe by a "decouple’ feature - in shelly terms they call it “edge” mode…
Hi 123, glad to hear that someone went down that path before me. Good point on keeping the existing wiring in place for easier recovery. I’m based in EU, so the junction boxes are a bit different, but I can work out similar solution to yours.
Regarding the electrical code, I would need to ask my local electrician about that. However, the light bulbs can be disconnected using the breaker so I guess technically it should be safe.
Very good point on pairing switch directly to lightbulbs. Does anyone know if it’s possible to setup a fallback pairing? So for example if controller is offline, switches pair with light bulbs?
How is the overall reliability in your case, 123? Do you need to maintain your setup often, or it’s just set and forget?
Hi, I’m glad to join the forum! I assume that by motion sensors, you’re referring to PIR sensors. I’m aware of their downsides, that’s why I planned to use presence sensors based on mmWave technology. From what I’ve seen they’re pretty good at recognising humans even when they’re sitting still or are in the shower.
Hi ferbulous, can you elaborate more on what you mean by switch/relay with decouple feature? I assume you mean a switch which can work in two ways - either connect or disconnect power physically when clicked or keep power connected all the time and only send commands to light bulbs to turn on and off. If that’s the case, then I would gladly do that, but the reality is that I’m trying to avoid placing new cable runs in the house, and in my case this would be required. Instead of that I plan on using wireless switches which are not connected to mains in any way and only send commands to light bulbs.
Hi KruseLuds, I totally agree with you on the “ideally” That’s basically the whole point of this thread - can I rely on HA and my hardware to work reliably enough to not worry about the situations you described. I’m well aware of them and this is my main concern.
I’m planning a much heaver renovation within few years, so I guess this solution wouldn’t be very permanent. During this renovation I will run extra cables so that every set of light bulbs will be physically controlled my a decoupled switch.
That’s where zigbee binding comes in, you can still control your lights even if ha/coordinator is down.
Since I don’t really plan to re-wire anything, I just enable decouple on the switches because toggling the lights on/off eventually gonna reset those zigbee lights.
Anyway I only use zigbee for sensors since my setup consist entirely of wifi lights/switch flashed with tasmota with tasmesh enabled keeping them linked directly. Helps with WAF because you never know if you wifi router/ha suddenly goes down
One troublesome item to reconsider related to Ikea bulbs. To put them in pairing mode you need to rapidly turn them on/off 6 times within few seconds. Without real switch a bit hard to achieve. I’d assume that you might have few bulbs on single breaker, so doing this using breaker will put all off the connected bulbs into pairing mode. You can try to screw the bulb in/out from socket, but as this is not exactly what the E27 or E14 was designed for it is hard to achieve exact number of proper connections… Telling this from experience, as I bridged some of wall switches to have similar setup to yours… Though once you get it working chances for need to replce the buld or need to re-pait are rather slim, these bulbs are pretty stable.
I agree that an IKEA bulb’s reset procedure can be challenging. I temporarily put the bulb in a lamp with an inline switch. Toggling the inline switch six times simplified the task.
@mirekmal@123 - thanks for the heads up on the reseting procedure, I wasn’t aware of that. Thankfully I have few light bulb holders lying around which I can employ to do this.
Overall, I feel like my concerns about reliability and stability of this setup were overrated. I’ll try to implement that in the near future and see how it went. Thanks!
Be careful what you ask for.
I think your ideas are dumb.
Zigbee bulbs are not always also routers. Check the specs.
Freak out your tenants. Suppose they DON’T want the lights on. For example, when a child is trying to sleep?
No. They will, as described before, freak out. They will figure that they can turn a light off by unscrewing the bulbs.
Numerous come to mind, but the most significant is- when you sell the house. You won’t be there forever, and smart homes still are a niche thing. You build the home for conventional switches and wiring, then replace the wall switches with smart switches. It’s easily reverted to conventional for later sale.
Reasonably priced ??? How many bulbs are you talking about? I always contend that controlling smart bulbs from a smart switch is about as dumb a plan as you can create. Unless you absolutely, can’t live without it, need color control, then any smart bulb is a waste of money. Use a smart switch and cheap dumb LEDs. If you use expensive smart bulbs, some of them will mysteriously disappear over time.
You are overthinking the problem and your tenants couldn’t care less. They just want switches to work like switches. They want to have control. Don’t take that decision from them. They won’t appreciate it. Especially if someone gets out of bed at 3AM to go to the toilet, the last thing you want is for the bedroom light to come on.
Ever hear of “Murphy’s Law”? “Anything that can go wrong, will.” And, it’s first corollary: “When something goes wrong it will occur at the most inconvenient time”. Plan on the 3AM phone call from an irate tenant- “How do I turn off the fr***ng light?”
My Home Assistant server is running on an Intel NUC in the basement, and I have only rebooted the host once or twice in the past three years. (To recover from something, I did wrong). It’s quite reliable.
That’s basically the whole point of this thread - can I rely on HA and my hardware to work reliably enough to not worry about the situations you described. I’m well aware of them and this is my main concern.