How good are Aqara H2 in Matter mode

Configuration Matter/Thread
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Hello Home Assistant fans,

I am a fresh HA user and for the past month I have been learning and tinkering. At first I compared Zigbee to Matter/Thread and I have made a decision that Matter and Thread, overall, are much better aligned with my smart home expectations. They never require internet or cloud or any 3rd party apps. They work after their manufacturer bankrupts, and so on. With this needed introduction I wish to discuss my choices and I ask for your opinion.

At first I purchased Sonoff M5 switch that is Matter over WiFi. This one requires a custom phone app to setup so it should have been eliminated from my choices, but I was so eager to install something that I told my self okay, let’s try it. It was the only switch that I could purchase and have in my hands that same day. My opinion after two weeks with it: it is less than ideal.

After a research I came up with Aqara H2 EU. I have already read many negative reviews, in the light of its Matter integration, but alas — it still felt like the best choice, until I find better. Today it has arrived and I did some tests:

First I tried with IKEA Kajplats bulb without the neutral wire and it seemed to work fine, except no Thread Routing and no power monitoring. Then I connected the neutral to get the remaining functionality:

  1. when I press top buttons they control relays directly and report the on/off status to HA, very similar to how Sonoff behaves
  2. when I press bottom buttons I get single press events (but twice in a row) in HA, so I can use these for various automation and to toggle my IKEA smart lights. why it sends each button press twice in a row, that remains a mistery. TBH it feels like a firmware bug
  3. while it does not expose double press and long press events to HA, it does expose the status of button pressed or not: while holding the button the value in HA is 1, when let go it is 0. So I have uses THAT functionality to BOTH toggle my lights AND to dim them: if button was held for less than 300ms then toggle light, but if the button is held for longer than 300ms then dim the light every 150ms by steps of brightness value of 5.
  4. since this switch is installed in my bathroom, at the moment, I have used the top buttons for the ventilation fan and for the mirror light so all four buttons are doing something

What does not work is tiny LED lights on the bottom switches. They are not exposed to HA so I have no way to fire them up. The upper ones do work because they are coupled locally with their relays. So when I turn on my mirror light in the bathroom then its tiny blue LED light lights up, but when I turn on the main bathroom IKEA bulb then I have no LED feedback on the Aqara switch. Either having all indicators working or having none of them working would be preferred to this mismatch hehe. I am aware that this is the limitation of the firmware in Matter mode, but it would be nice to see Aqara give more Matter love (mater means mother in my language, btw) to this switch.

I ask for your opinion on this switch and which one else might you recommend to me to be a better choice when it comes to Matter-over-Thread? Please speak from experience because specifications are one thing but using the device is another.

My end goal is to purchase 7 switches of the same type/kind for my apartment after I am fully satisfied with the test run. For now Aqara is a better device than WiFi Sonoff, for sure, but it feels “unfinished” from the Matter side of things.

Thank you for your opinion.

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Well, that matter stuff seems to be:

Personally I have been avoiding it, and yesterday was forced to buy a thing that ‘matters’ and cannot get it to connect. HA starts the negotiate and fails 10 times in a row. Google device can’t find it. Samsung can find it and wants to pair but the whole smartthings charging me to use it debacle I won’t go there. The TCL app that has QR codes all over the thing to connect directly with goes thru a 2fa that is supposed to send me an email code. I tried 2 emails multiple times and that don’t work.
I just want it to WIFI or Zigbee or even Zwave. This Matter was not needed and only complicates the world. I’m happy that it’s working out so well for you. (Oh wait, it isn’t…)
It appears I bought a smart device that isn’t smart at all.
This is from an 8 year HA veteran.

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Thank you for the reply. I have been considering adding a second ZBT-2 to gain Zigbee functionality as well, so I can have access to more hardware. So far I haven’t had any issues with pairing Matter/Thread devices, but obviously Zigbee devices are much more mature.

I don’t want to sound too religious, but it is important to me that a device which I will adopt permanently works out of the box with zero 3rd party cloud or e-mail or smartphone requirement. And this kinda is bad new for Aqara H2 because you can’t switch it to Zigbee mode without creating Aqara account. But it’s a pretty switch to my eye, looks nice and build quality seems good. Though, the relays are very loud.

To wrap this up: Your general opinion on this Matter is that it’s immature and I should consider some native Zigbee devices, correct?

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I don’t think there is a better choice on the market if you’re looking for a Matter over Thread light switch. The integrated relay and optional neutral wiring made it a first choice for me as I’m slowly upgrading the wiring in my house.

At this time we won’t be able to get the LED entity in HA. But perhaps a future firmware from Aqara will expose this. So it’s only something you can controle within the Aqara app. Fingers crossed Aqara keep their word on exposing more entities (like the LED) to third parties (like HA) on their devices in their latest firmware push.

As for my Matter experience. I currently have 49 Matter device (6 wifi, the rest Thread), and aside from 1 device (ALPSTUGA) I never had problems setting them up. I was actually surprised with a few products how quickly I got through the setup. All of them are used with a ZBT-2 in HA. And exposed to Google Home from there.

As from stability and daily use, I had some issues at start but this got fixed with an update to OBTR and the Matter integration and switching to channel 25. Since then I have the occasional presence sensor getting stuck. And one specific bulb losing connection. But it’s been smooth sailing as I’ve been expanding my house with Matter products.

I have my Aqara H2 Light Switch installed in the bathroom as well. Only I have a dumb light. So I will always press it to turn on the light, which will enable the LED. As for turning it off, I have an automation that it turns off if my presence is detected in another room for more than 90 seconds.
I also agree that they are pretty loud. I was disappointed about that. At first I thought I had done the wiring wrong or had a faulty unit but the other I got was similar

I focus on one thing when making purchases, and that is what they can do for me right now and not what they might potentially do. As firmware development lies with the manufacturer to expose more entities.
So for me the LED working not working in the scenario you sketch would not be important for me. As turning this on/off be that manually or automatically is more important.

Matter is immature when compared to Zigbee, but the latter has been around since 1998. Matter/Thread has been around since 2014.
But when you just look at it without comparing it’s pretty healthy. Especially thanks to IKEA as it makes it more affordable. And focused on the most common devices (lights, buttons, open/close sensor.

As for getting native Zigbee devices, this has to be a personal choice. If you already have a Zigbee bridge/router then adding Zigbee devices makes sense. But If you don’t have that stick to the road you’re on.
On the internet you’ll read more about people with bad experiences than those with good experiences.

So in your use case my opinion is that they are worth is, if you can disregard the LED not working as you want it to. If not you’ll have to wait for a possible product to arrive that might also have a LED plus be Matter over Thread and not just Matter over Wifi or even worse Zigbee 3.0 but exposed to Matter for other bridges.

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Aqara isn’t stopping you from using a throwaway email address & deleting the app after switching your device to Zigbee mode :wink:

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Thank you very much for your detailed reply. I also felt that choosing the Aqara H2 was the right direction, but I still need some time with it before I can be confident enough to standardize on it.

You mentioned that you upgraded your wiring gradually. I have seven lighting circuits and so far I have added neutral only to the bathroom. I did that one myself and it was not particularly easy, so for the remaining circuits I will most likely pay an electrician. That part is not directly related to the H2 itself, though.

Since my first post I have already found one H2/Matter quirk that made me reconsider how I use the buttons in Home Assistant.

I was using the exposed Current switch position state to distinguish short and long presses. The button reports 1 while physically held and returns to 0 when released. Today, however, HA never received the transition back to 0, so it remained stuck in the “pressed” state.

Unfortunately I had programmed that held state to continuously increase brightness, so the light kept receiving brightness commands and the other button could not reliably turn it off. Pressing and releasing the affected button once more immediately synchronized the state again and returned everything to normal.

As a fellow tinkerer you will probably agree that this is not a particularly difficult problem to work around. However, my primary design requirement is WAF. If my wife had discovered this instead of me, I would probably have been executed for replacing the “perfectly good switches that already worked”. :slight_smile:

I will therefore probably go back to using the normal button press events for ordinary switching, and either add a safety timeout to long-press actions or simply avoid long press for now.

The missing LED control in the current Matter firmware is not a deal breaker either, just a minor annoyance.

My wife wants wall switches to behave as simply as possible: press one thing and the light toggles. She strongly dislikes having to remember which side of a rocker is ON and which is OFF.

Because of that, I am considering the following setup for the normal rooms:

Aqara H2 EU single-gang, powered with L+N, but with the smart IKEA bulb connected permanently to line rather than through L1. The H2 relay would therefore switch no physical load.

If the upper button changes the relay state, Home Assistant would use that state change to control the smart bulb. If the bulb is changed by anything else, another automation would synchronize the H2 relay state so that the switch LED remains consistent with the actual light state.

If the lower button is pressed, Home Assistant would change the H2 relay state as well, so in normal use both physical sides effectively behave as the same toggle switch.

I could still reserve a long press on the lower button for a secondary function that only I care about, while the rest of the family can completely ignore it.

If you see a cleaner way to handle this, I would be very interested to hear it. I am still learning and experimenting every day, so even criticism, irony or sarcasm is useful if there is technical information behind it. Thanks again.

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Apologies for leaving the impression that this is about privacy. It’s not that, but I want my smart home devices to be 100% functional without any cloud/app dependence. I can have faith that Aqara is not a company that will go bankrupt next week, but for the sake of peace in my head I will keep using it in default Thread mode as this suits me. Zigbee functionality I will treat as non-existant in this device, and frankly I don’t really feel like adding Zigbee network to my home after already installing 15 Matter/Thread devices and one Matter/Wifi device.

Perhaps my attitude is wrong and I will find that out later, but right now I am convinced that full independence is a good thing. The only thing I have yet to find out is whether Aqara will provide firmware updates for H2 in the way that Home Assistant can fetch it or will I need to factory reset the switch every time I wish to update it via SmartPhone app? I tried finding that out, but all my serch points that firmware 1.0.1 is the only one, so far.

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Yes, which is why I would recommend Zigbee rather than Matter. I won’t go into the merits beside the fact that Zigbee is always local, but search the forums for Matter & you’ll find out soon enough. (Like this thread)

I know they’ve released Matter updates, but it looks like at this point you need their hub to update your firmware. There’s another trick which involves switching your device to Zigbee mode, then back to Matter again - that’ll pull the latest firmware off their server without requiring a hub. Personally, I have no issues with this since Z2M provides those OTA files natively after a little while.

I know I’m starting to sound like a broken record, but if I were in your shoes, I’d trash the Matter devices & chalk it up to a bad decision. Been there with Wifi & have a house’s worth of switches which will never be installed. Folks around here call that the drawer of shame, so you’d be in good company :wink:

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After primarily using IKEA Bilresa switches for a while (the dumb switches have tape over them so you can’t press them) I noticed one unexpected advantage of Aqara H2 limited Matter firmware: When I press the bottom button my light turns on at once, without waiting first to see if I am doing the double press event or not.

Is there a way to check which is the last firmware for Aqara H2 without factory resetting it? Like maybe there is a forum thread where people write which update came out when? I really tried searching for such a forum thread, but found none so far. I guess I would not cry a lot if I had to do one factory reset to gain new functionality, but for just checking whether there is an update …

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I don’t expect WiFi deployment to ever become easy/simple. Thread and Zigbee seem to be the way. insert Mandalorian helmet here

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Ironically, I went through the trouble of flashing each switch with Tasmota to make sure that it was fully local. By the time I was done, I realised it was not the way. I didn’t wanna reserve a 50-IP chunk of my network just for switches.

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In a big house I would probably divide smart home into a separate VLAN. Maybe that would cause a different issue with automation. Maybe a /23 subnet would server better. It’s all very case specific and not Aqara related.

I am continuing my H2 testing. It’s going well, so far.

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I’m going to respectfully do a Homerbacksintohedge.gif here. If there’s 2 things I wouldn’t do, it’s Matter & Vlans. May you live long and prosper. Oh wait, wrong reference :stuck_out_tongue:

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I would say try it. That is always the best way. From my first thoughts I don’t see another way to achieve what you want.

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Hi.
I am also building smarthome arround Aqara H2 EU switches and Kajplats bulbs.
I also hove a bunch of shelly switches and some sonoff ZBMINR2 and ZBMINL2 (where I couldn’t provide the N wire).
I found H2 very reliable in Zigbee mode (ZigBee2MQTT) but there are some frustrating stuff.
Direct bind with Zigbee bulbs does not work (I have one Aqara T2 bulb).
In matter/thread mode long press and multi-press is not supported.
The problem is I bought it specifically for the use of all for buttons as I want to use them for all sort of stuff (to control the awning, climate on/off, dimming and so on).
I have set it up in Zigbee mode and it works very well I must say.
Have you ever tried direct aqara/kajplats matter binding (like billresa/kajplatrs)?
I also see that you managed to use multi-click in thread mode on lower buttons, or did I miss interpret?
I see you are from Croatia (I assume so by your “matter/majka” comment and by the avatar flag).
If you are up to exchange some experiences in our native tongue that woul be great.

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I don’t believe it’s allowed to talk in Croatian here, but we can talk yes.
I did manage to get long press working in Matter mode. I did not try Zigbee mode at all. I don’t have any Zigbee equipment.

You can actually use upper buttons in Matter mode too, but unfortunately relays will click as well.

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If multi-click and long press are working, that would be really great news as this would enable me to change the mode from Zigbee to matter on those Aqara switches and not loose any of my current functionality.
Does it work on both upper and lower buttons in detached mode?
Have you by any chance tried matter binding with Kajplats?
This is actually the one thing i am missing - direct bind to a bulb in case HA is down.
I know Zigbee binding does not work (i have one Aqara T2 bulb).
I know they support MARS tech but that requires their hub and their bulbs which i really don’t wabt to buy right now.
If multiclick in matter/thread and direct bind were supported it would be a perfect switch for me.

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I did not try direct binding. I don’t yet know how to set that up?
So, once again, multi-click and long press are NOT functionalities exposed by H2 on Matter. The switch only exposes the live state of the “is pressed” status. I automate from that information on the HA side like this:

if status pressed is 1 then 0 then 1 again within 300ms then do “this” (double click)
if status pressed is 1 then 0 then 1 again then 0 then 1 again within 300ms then do “this” (tripple click)
if status pressed is 1 then 0 withing 300ms then do that (single click)
if status pressed is 1 for longer than 300ms then do something else (long press)

For example I use it like this in my setup:
if status pressed is 1 for longer than 300ms then increase brightness by steps of 5% every 150ms until the pressed status is 0. this works ok, although sometimes it can jam and remain in status 1 indefinitely so I had to build a guard to cut the loop after 5 seconds.

Generally I cannot recommend this before they fix the bug where it sometimes stays in “pressed = 1” status because it ruins the UX. Keep your device in Zigbee mode, for now. I will keep mine in Matter mode and report back after the next firmware update drops.

If you wish to talk to me you can find me on YouTube. There are some links which will guide you to chat with me.

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That would be great.
Do you have a youtube link?
As for the long press and dimming, with 5% steps I can imagine that isn’t really smoothas bilresa/Kajplats direct bind combo if you tried it? If you haven’t tried that, there is a simple way to bind them and kits already come bined to each other (bilresa/kaplats kits).
https://www.ikea.com/hr/hr/p/kajplats-osnovni-set-pametno-bijeli-spektar-60611446/

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I am a new member, I can’t post links without approval. But you can see the link in my profile.
I tried bilresa/kajplats direct bind before I attached them to HA and dimming was super smooth. I am not sure how to replicate that through HA, with which steps? The Aqara switch isn’t a problem because it simply sends “OK the button is now being held” so in the automation you can use while loop. But the commands that must be sent to the bulb are a bit unknown to me. I tried to tell the bulb to increase brightness in 1% steps but it was ultra slow at 150ms intervals. When I tried to shorten intervals it didn’t work. I don’t know what the shortest interval is.