Remote Light Switch Suggestions?

Here’s my issue:
I have replaced a Ceiling Fan with a Ceiling Light. The fan had a pull chain for on/off operation and no wall switch.
I have a Wall Plate (with power) I want to install a Light Switch in to control the new Ceiling Light. But I cannot run power from the Wall Plate to the Ceiling light without tearing out the walls and ceiling.

So I’m looking for a way to have the Light Switch remote control the Ceiling Fan and work with HA via WiFi. Tasmota / ESPHome would be gravy.

Not sure how to even Google for something like this.

Suggestions?

If the Switch can control the Light directly (without passing Through HA, but still work with HA, that would be awe-so-me)

How are you controlling the new ceiling light installed now?
Sonoff mini R4 for the ceiling light
Light switch - Sonoff Switchman
Install tasmota on both and enable device group.

1 Like

I would say the King of Fans remote. It is a module that you install inline between power and the fan and light wires so constant power to the light. They make a hand-held remote as well as a wall mounted remote that sits in a single gang box. It is powered by a battery. I use them. They run over Zigbee

My only gripe is after a while, I have to re-join them to my network by discovering for new Zigbee devices and then powering on and off the breaker 5 times 3 seconds a on or off cycle. I haven’t figured out why this keeps happening.

You can put a Shelly 4i in the wall box where the switch is, which then controls a Shelly 1 connected to the fan and light. You’ll need something better than a Shelly 1 if you want to control the fan speed too. You can hook this up directly, still over WiFi, skipping HA, but with the ability control with HA too.

1 Like

I’m not. It’s always on with a very low power LED light in it (at the moment).

If I’m reading the overview and manual correctly, looks like I can use 1 Mini R4 at the light and another at the switch (with any switch) to remote control the light over Wifi from the switch. (??)

Thanks!

This looks very similar to the Sonoff solution and looks like it does not require re-flashing of the ROM to avoid ‘Cloud Control’.

Thanks!

1 Like

Yes, as long as both device are running tasmota. That’s the magic of device group

Additionally, there’s another feature called tasmesh utilizing espnow. The switch can still control the light even when wifi is down.

1 Like

So, its been a while. Finally got to work on this and everything is set up on my local network (using pfSense router). Took it to its ‘home’, which is Gfiber, and bonk it don’t work.

Gfiber does not currently support Multicast used by DeviceGroups. So no messages get broadcast to be received.

Read further on TasMesh and it says this:

  • An ESP32 is only supported as a broker
  • An ESP8266 is only supported as a node

So, no matter what the Sonoff Mini uses, their either Both brokers or nodes. And it requires a recompile of the code to enable - something I’ve never done.

My kluge fix here is to use HA and Automations to control the light from the switch - or set up a sub-net using a different router (that supports Multicast) and have just those two devices on it.

Any other options?

Tasmesh is quite useful but there hasn’t been much update to it

You could use the older sonoff mini r2 (esp8266) as node with switchman (esp32) as broker

As for compiling the firmware, it can be easily done with tasmocompiler (open the gitpond link, enable popup)

Add #define USE_TASMESH under custom parameter then hit compile

I’d recommend testing on esp32 and esp8266 devboard before enabling it on the switches