I’m doing an extensive remodel (full gut) of a home and I am a little stuck on which way to go with lighting/control. In my current place, I have Lutron Radio RA2 and I love it. The one thing that I wish it had is an option to integrate/control RGBW recessed lights. As I understand it, if I wanted RGBW lights, I’d essentially have to keep the load on, and control the light using another interface.
Ideally, I’d love the ability to have single-gang dimmers around the house, but have all the control logic of those dimmers handled by Home Assistant.
I would love to hear anyone’s thoughts on doing this. I live in the USA so hoping for compatible product recommendations!
True panelized lighting systems like Lutron HomeWorks, Control4, Crestron, etc are all dealer installed products. Their ability to work with Home Assistant varies.
Unfortunately the response rate on this forum is low for these systems including RadioRA 2. The current Lutron RadioRA 2 and HomeWorks integration kind of works but needs to be re-done for UI setup. Someone has been working on it for a while, but does not appear to be making swift progress. Hubitat has a very good Lutron integration and Home Assistant has a good Hubitat integration. There are some people that use Hubitat for its device capabilities (also including Z-Wave and Zigbee) and use Home Assistant for automation and dashboards.
You can fake a panelized setup with RadioRA 2. You can run the dimmers to a closet or to a central equipment room. And then have a keypad in the living space. You can add RGBW bulbs to a keypad button via Home Assistant.
I had no idea I could control the LEDs on the keypads! This is pretty cool and solves my issue. I’ll associate the buttons with fake scenes in Lutron which will trigger different things in Home Assistant. I find the Lutron integration in Home Assistant ROCK SOLID and Ra2 is one of the most reliable pieces of smart home tech I’ve got. It doesn’t hurt that I’m a dealer and can configure my stuff- I can imagine most people here would be frustrated by the closed nature of Ra2 (if anyone needs help with this, reach out to me).
I’ve seen quite a few of my competitors doing multiple dimmers inside closets, and I always find it weird that they choose to do that over simply installing a LQRJ-WPM-6P or QSGRJ-6P, which is what I’m probably going to install. This way, if I ever move, the home can fall back on a pure Lutron setup with minimal fuss.
Note that to control the LED via a 3rd party system like Home Assistant there can be no Lutron programming on the button. If there is Lutron programming on a button the Main Repeater will override any attempts to set the LED. So just leave it blank and have Home Assistant control the lights (even if it’s virtually pushing a Lutron button) and the LED. The alternative is to set up fake dimmers in Lutron and sync the fake with real in Home Assistant, but that uses up a device slot and creates activation errors.