Making Lutron switches work with Philips HUE lights with Zigbee2MQTT

Configuration Zigbee
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I likely made a bad choice in using Lutron and zigbee based Philips hue lights together. I read many posts saying they were separately rock solid, which is what I was after.

I know know turning off zigbee devices is a bad idea. I could hardwire the lights and have the Lutron switches turn them on via an automation. If I do that and HA fails, I have no lights.

The problem I'm facing is the lights show up in the dashboard as on, even when they are off. Using the card for the zigbee group of lights, I can change the state to off, even through the lights are already off. The dashboard shows that correctly.

I made an automation that triggers when the Lutron switch goes to off. It publishes to Zigbee2MQTT/SwichName with a payload of { state: "OFF" }. That works, the light shows as off immediately.

One drawback of this setup is the zigbee group, and the group members don't show up as on for 1-3 seconds after they are actually turned on. I assume it takes a bit for them to join the zigbee mesh and for Zigbee2MQTT to propagate the state.

I tried making an automation triggered when the Lutron switches on. It publishes light state to ON via MQTT. It has no effect.

Are there any better ways do with this without replacing the switches. I've spent quite a bit on switches and lights. I really don't want to replace them.

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And another one is that removing devices will seriously mess up your zigbee mesh, as powered zigbee devices are normally also used as routers…

But to be short, i also went for zigbee switches, and then the wife decided she wanted hue lights. :person_facepalming:

So now I am using HA to sync light and switches where hue lights are connected (some of them are dimmers, making it even more difficult).

All I have to do is make sure HA is up and running. I run HA on an old laptop with UPS and I have an identical machine as spare j.i.c. :person_shrugging:

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Thanks. I have HA on proxmox, and will eventually have a high availability cluster. So hopefully I will be somewhat protected from hardware failures. However, there are some single points of failure, those being the Lutron Hub and the Zigbee coordinator. Either of those can fail and I can still operate the lights.

I previously had some wifi switches running Tasmota. I had several switches fail. Chinese brands being what they are, I could never get direct replacements. My OCD side didn't like having different looking switches next to each other. However, I did like the programability of the switches. I'll have 65+ switches when I'm done, so replacing them would be costly.

Maybe I can figure out a way to turn them into zigbee switches. I could hardwire the lights, and have the switch signal a local zigbee device (esp32 or similar) that would turn the light on and off. It would be a bit of a hack, but perhaps cheaper than replacing the switches.