hi everyone!
I have just moved into a new house and I am trying to design how to integrate lighting into HA.
In the past I had used Tradfri lights but there were some obvious shortcomings:
when someone would turn the wall switch off, the light would be of course unreachable
if the light was off, but powered, it would take 2-3 wall switches attempt before the light would turn on.
This naturally brought the home acceptance factor to the verge of fighting, so in this house I am trying to correct the course.
My goals are:
be able to use “smart” lights trough HA (automations, scenes etc)
be able to retain the use of wall switches and not get everyone crazy
basic functionality (single light on-off) should be resilient to HA going down, rebooting, udating etc
Keeping 1. and 2. in mind, I made a proof of concept using a shelly 1 mini in detached mode and a HA automation that reacts whenever the wall switch is triggered but HA would be a single point of failure in this case.
I would like to stay within the shelly ecosystem and I am considering moving everything to a direct Zigbee network with a ZBT-2 (lights + shelly relays) but I am wondering if in this case I could “pair” the zigbee relay directly to one or more lights.
To meet all 3 gaols, keep the current Shelly 1, but flash it to ESPHome. You’ll be able to enable/disable decoupled mode depending on whether it’s connected to the HA API. Search around the forums or start here for the trigger.
Unfortunately, you can’t really do this with zigbee & the Shelly Gen4 still have a few teething issues where there is no input monitoring, so you can’t really use decoupled mode for now.
The input issue should be fixed by Shelly when firmware 1.8 is released (whenever that happens), but it won’t solve the problem that you can’t wrote automations directly on a zigbee device. You’ll basically have to reset it to switch off decoupled mode if HA goes down.
Your other option is direct zigbee binding, but that in itself is a black art and not all zigbee swithces/bulbs support it.
I think this would be the “pairing” I was thinking about.
I am relatively new to Zigbee, but I have used in the past IKEA Tradfri bulbs and remotes which I understand are fundamentally Zigbee.
If I have - say - a zigbee wall switch from company A which is supporting Zigbee, shouldn’t I be able to pair it to a bulb from company B which is also Zigbee?
Why not rig everything for a bedroom light as though one switch on the wall XOR one HA automated switch such as a Shelly relay were connected like upstairs/downstairs pairs usually are. That is, a hand switching operation at one light switch toggles that light, making available instant and software-fault-proof what that light switch on the wall usually did, and to toggle that HA automated switch toggles that light (if HA is available). The downside is that you can’t tell from looking at the switch position on the wall or from the HA automated switch state whether a light should be on, making one more check preferable if you needed to change a light bulb, and making every automation do detect&toggle instead of “switch on” or “switch off”, which might not suit what you plan to do. Something else might be needed for safety-critical places which should not be dark such as on the stairs, but I hope that this gives you useful ideas. An extra backup for safety is to have small “nightlight” LED or 3-pin plug mounted lights for navigation if the usual illumination won’t light.
Yes, but binding devices is a bit of a black art, like I said in my previous post.
Ikea are somewhat better than the other manufacturers because they expose lots of output clusters for binding (and support Touchlink, which is essentially the same thing without involving HA).
Other manufacturers do not generally expose a bunch of output clusters for switches, so you might be limited unless you use wireless switches, which is not really advisable.
Your other option if your HA/zigbee network should go down, would be to use a zigbee switch which supports decoupled mode, then reset the switch using whatever reset procedure is required for it. It’s not ideal, because you’ll probably have to re-pair your switch to the zigbee network once it’s back up, but it’ll do in a pinch.
The main issue with this approach I think is that if one of the switches on the wall would cut the power to the bulb, I might not be able to turn it on from other automations… And I have witnessed that IKEA ones in particular are very slower on letting HA know that they are unreachable.
I see what you mean: I have been checking these two:
and
and only the wireless one mentions “Find&Bind pairing”, also in the manual.
Strangely I cannot find the manual for the wired one.
Another possibility would be putting a shelly 1 mini (zigbee) behind every switch and bind it to one or more lights… would that work?
Possibly yes, but you’d have to check with Shelly themselves first. They’re still rolling out basic features for the Gen 4. Not sure if binding is already supported or coming in a future firmware.
