I am looking for the best solution for controlling lights at home. First of all, I want to say that the solution should be uncompromising and as robust as possible, so that when there is an outage in Home Assistant, other users can continue to function normally.
What would be the best solution so that the light can be controlled via a wall switch and also through Home Assistant? Another requirement is the ability to change the color temperature and dim the light.
Another requirement is that after a Home Assistant outage, it should be possible to turn the lights on via wall switch.
The situation involves a standard EU electrical installation. The switch in the wall is connected to a 230V power supply that continues to the light.
My consideration is to use Sonoff switches with Tasmota firmware flashed on them. The lights will have smart Zigbee bulbs. Tasmota will operate in detached relay mode, meaning the bulbs will always be powered. This is important because the bulbs are part of the Zigbee network, and disconnecting them from power would negatively impact the Zigbee network. Additionally, Tasmota will monitor the MQTT connection; if the connection drops, it will switch to a standard mode where it will cut power to the bulb.
Does anyone have a setup like this at home? Are there any guides on how to configure Tasmota in this way? Additionally, how can I control Zigbee bulbs directly through MQTT using Tasmota?
If you’re going to have smart switches, then there is no need to use smart bulbs. Smart switches give you what you want. Shelly sells a complete lineup of devices that you mount in the wall behind the light switch. I’d suggest you look at their products. Using the smart switch, it’ll just work even if HA is offline. Alternatively I’d suggest you look at your ESP home options for switches, as you could add whatever additional code you like to them. I use the sonoff wall swtiches with flashed with ESPhome when i want to add additional smarts at the switch.
I’m currently using it this way, but instead of ESPHome, I have Tasmota firmware flashed on my Sonoff devices. However, it doesn’t address the change in color temperature, which is quite essential for me. With the Adaptive Lighting plugin, I change the color temperature based on the position of the sun.
Not available in the EU yet (they are working on it), but Inovelli wall switches do everything you need (zwave, zigbee, and matter versions are available) and they have a “smart bulb mode” which does exactly what you want.
I use adaptive lighting with them - works a peach!
You can still use the bulbs for adaptive lighting even with the smart switches. I prefer ESPhome over tasmota because HA has the ESPHome development add available directly in HA. This makes it easy to make code changes and then ensure the code is included in your HA backups, should you have an issue at some point. While I haven’t used it, ESP home does have MQTT code available. Your MQTT broker would have to be on something else other than HA if you want it to work without the HA controller. Alternatively you just skip any light color changes while the HA controller is offline.
Some people want RGB, dimming control and more. In that case, you need switches with long presses, double taps, etc. Maybe OP has a need for RGB bulbs.
I have places where I have RGB bulbs that act as night lights (dim red) upon motion, but otherwise can be controlled by a normal wall switch, in which case a default, white light profile gets used. Important to note though that this works independently from HA (while it can also be controlled from HA), since the devices connect directly over WiFi (so it still needs WiFi and isn’t wired).
Of course, if Home Assistant goes down, you only need the basic functions to turn the lights on and off. The problem is that if I cut the power to the bulbs, it causes issues in the Zigbee network.
The link in that comment provides a way better explanation than I ever could…
TLDR - Smart bulb mode prevents you from turning off the physical power to the light socket. Turning off the switch on the wall doesn’t turn off power to the smart bulb, it just sends out a command to turn off the smart bulb so you can still control it to turn it back on from elsewhere. Turning the wall switch on sends a command for the smart bulb to turn on.
It works with any smart bulb. As a matter of fact the smart bulb doesn’t even need to be on the actual circut the switch is. You can use a wall switch in smart bulb mode to control ANY smart bulb on the network by pairing it in the switch configuration.