I’ve been using Livolo RF wall switches for several years, integrated into Home Assistant through a Broadlink remote. This setup mostly worked, but with one important limitation: Livolo RF switches do not report their state to HA.
I also have Philips Hue bulbs above my bar counter with no physical switch (constant power), and they have always worked perfectly.
Recently, I replaced the rest of the lights in my home with Zigbee bulbs — and immediately ran into a serious issue.
When I use my existing Livolo switches, the built-in relay physically cuts power to the Zigbee bulbs. As soon as that happens, the bulbs drop off the network, disrupt the Zigbee mesh, and become unreliable.
Is the only proper solution to avoid using the relay entirely and keep the bulbs permanently powered?
If so, how do you physically turn the lights on and off in such a setup?
Unfortunately, this brand is not available in my country. From what I understand, the relay isn’t used at all. It seems you would need to look for versions with a separate relay and binding functionality for cases when HA goes down?
Correct. HA is listening for a change of state of the relay (switch) to trigger the automation.
There are Shelly devices and Sonoff devices that sit behind the wall switch and offer the decoupled relay mode. I’m not sure whether they offer Zigbee binding though.
If you have a neutral line ending at the mount box where the switch(es) are located you can add a Sonoff ZBMINIR2 to it. With its Detach Relay Mode the Zigbee bulbs will not get affected by physical power cuts.
and I’m not sure how many smart wall switches allow you to control the RGB function of a smart bulb. there are dimmer switches you could use for dimmable bulbs but I don’t know of any that control RGB. All RGB bulbs I know of need some kind of RGB remote or an RGB control in HA/etc. And I definitely don’t want to have to pull out my phone, yell at a voice assistant or find a remote control every time I want to turn my lights on & off.
Maybe I’m just weird (duh…) but I don’t think I would want to change colors on my normal general lighting bulbs. A few accent lights or special purpose lights use RGB functions but not my general area lighting.
Zigbee opens another option: use zigbee controllers (buttons) that can be directly linked with a bulb (without coordinator).
I don’t know any such controller that has form factor similar to a wall switch. It doesn’t mean they don’t exist. Most of of them limit bulb control to on/off and light intensity, sometimes light warmth.
Example: Philips Hue Tap Dial Switch
Such a setup doesn’t exclude HA from equation. The controller can be linked with the bulb and the coordinator (HA zigbee dongle) at the same time.
To avoid cutting power off from these lights, you need to remove wall switches or teach the family to not use them. you can somehow mount zigbee buttons/controllers in the same place
You can rewire the switch to always send live to the bulb.
You have L (in) and a L1 (out?) on the switch.
If you pull out the cable from L1 and place it on L then you do not switch the bulb, but you can still use the smart switch and react to the relay clicking.
Yes, the switch has L and L1 connected. But how would the Livolo be powered in that case? Do you mean creating a jumper between them? And the second issue is that these are RF Livolo switches — they don’t provide any feedback at all.
No, you wire the incoming Live and outgoing Load to the same ‘L’ terminal on the switch. I suspect that you would need neutral at the switch for the switch itself to be powered.