Kitchen Spotlights

Hardware
1

Hi,

I can see you can buy kitchen spotlights with Zigbee and Zwave. If you had say 8 spotlights, is this the best way to do it?

I wondered if there was such a Zigbee or Zwave device that you slaved cheaper bulbs from somehow, like a device with 8 light outputs you can adjust for brightness/colour?

I can see there are central controllers that control LED lighting strip, so I suppose I wondered if the same sort of thing applied to any other light/bulb types.

2

You can use 12V/24V LED spots that are equivalent to strip.
Something like these.
https://aliexpress.com/item/1005001873776089.html

3

For a kitchen, I’d just go with dumb lights & a smart switch (or dimmer). With Zwave & Zigbee, you’ll end up not being able to turn the lights off at the switch because you’ll kill the mesh.

I’m saying this because you will likely never need to switch on a single light - at a bare minimum you’d be switching 2 at a time.
You’ll also get tired pretty quickly of colour changing lights in a kitchen. Ask me how I know.

That just leaves you with brightness control, so you have 2 3 options:

  • Get a 2-3 gang smart switch and ask an electrician to split your lights into groups of 4-4 or 4-2-2.
  • Leave everything as a single group and get a single gang smart dimmer for general brightness control.
  • Combine both the above and get a 2 gang smart dimmer + split your lights into 2 groups. These are generally harder to find & depend on your country’s switch formats (which we don’t know yet), but they do exist.
4

But that takes out color control OP wanted.

My preference would be Shelly RGBW and dumb 12/24V RGBW spot lights. Equivalent to LED strip setup.

1 Like
5

Smart lights losing power when used with a dumb mechanical switch can be solved with Shelly/Sonoff/Aqara devices that sit behind the switch and offer a decoupled mode.