New house lighting: Choosing between 2 options

Hardware
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1

Dear All,
I have been pondering this decision for a few months, and still cannot get to a conclusion despite significant data gathering.
Hoping to get some critical comments too push me in a direction.

Background info:

  • House is in Thailand (240v)
  • I want the physical wiring to be similar to traditional (due to skill level of electrical teams)
  • I love data… (I work in Industrial Automation, and spend a lot of time with our AI teams)
  • I will be tying the lighting into a whole home mmWave sensor deployment
  • I will be using dimming
  • Each of the lighting circuits are designed around very small areas. So rather than 1 large circuit for the whole living room, I have tried to cut this down into smaller groups, that I can still control together or seperately.
  • I am thinking for the downlights to buy Zigbee models, just incase I want to play with that in the future. But for now using them in a more traditional manner.
  • It is a quite large house (Total of switches, blinds, other will be around 150+ zigbee devices)
  • Wifi network is 6 unify APs (concrete between the 2 floors)

Option 1: Legrand/Bticino - Mallia Senses
This is a new range from Bticino that is 100% Zigbee based, whilst they sell it as a complete system you can actually connect it to your own coordinator and manage it in systems such as Z2M+HA

I like that it can essentially be 100% off the shelf, but still get the integration that I want. Plus they look really good.
The switch design/look has approval from my wife…

My concerns are:

  • No power monitoring capability
  • Lack of community support
  • Lack of ability to reconfigure how the switch/relay works, this is really important as it could significant impact my ability to use mmWave sensors to drive the relay, or use a simple switch to drive multiple relays.

Website: https://www.legrand.com.sg/product/mallia-senses
Tech details in catalogue: https://www.legrand.com.sg/sites/default/files/downloads/SEA%2022B26%20-%20June%202022_low%20res.pdf
From Legrand wiring guide:

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Option 2: Shelly:
I love the open source nature of these products, I love the Power Monitoring, I love the configurability of the product.
Key for me was that I can run it disconnected; so I can have the switch drive multiple relays. Use other inputs to drive the relay, etc

My concerns are:

  • What happens if we sell the house?
  • What happens if HA fails while I am not home (but my family are)

Option 3: Mallia Senses + Shelly:
This might seem like overkill…

But if I use Shelly as the main control devices, but have the Bticino driving the switch input?

So then I get all the functionality and flexibility of the Shelly, but the design my wife wants and the ability to easily rip out the shelly and just go with Bticino so it is simple when we move.

2

You could use ZWave dimmers connected to normal light fittings. These will then still work if HA is offline and if you sell the house all you have to do (if you don’t want to give away your smart home tech) is replace the ZWave dimmers with standard dimmers.

The likes of Aeotec make really nice dimmers that also have power monitoring. They are unfortunately not cheap…

3

I’m not familiar with this Z-:honeybee:/:ocean: stuff so I skip to comment on that.

Indeed, all esp based products should be 100% ownable (not only hardware but also software).

If the shellies you are thinking of the ones you put behind your switch I wouldn’t choose this type for a new installation. Instead I would go with a esp based wall switch solution as it offers couple of benefits like detecting double/long/etc-clicks, exposing led’s and have 1/2/3-gang versions avaialble.

That can be easily monitored in software actually with something like powercalc or even directly on a esp when running esphome for example.

You ether sell it with wall switches or without :thinking:

If you are owning your hardware completely (not only buy it) you can account for that. My wall switches all run esphome and I distinguish between “comfort” features (that rely on ha) and the basic functions that work 24-7 even if wifi/ha is down (like switching a locally attached relay with a local button press). The only time they will not work is if the energy is down - but that doesn’t bother much :wink:

So you might want to check out solutions like the sonoff switchman:
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or some nameless esp based wall switches:
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