An old fashioned wall switch - turning the light on or off - even if the switch is turned off, so the circuit is physically disconnected - you can remotely turn the light on anyway (in that case you had used a Shelly Relay to set the physical switch into an “edge” switch)! So if the person then turns the switch to the off position, the lights which were already off, would go on. It doesn’t matter anymore the position of the switch in this case - whatever state the light is in, when the switch state is changed only once, the light changes to the other state. The way this is possible, there is a Shelley relay behind the wall switch (the switch wires are attached to the Shelly relay instead), and the wires to the light are also attached to the Shelly relay instead of the switch. It’s pretty incredible. End result is, the switch always works, and doing it remotely also works, without the two concepts conflicting.
So that same concept can be used with a table lamp light socket, to have the relay circuitry within the old fashioned looking table light switch socket itself - so “traditionalists” that hate automation would not be annoyed because twisting the little light socket switch would just turn the light on or off anyway… Using just a smart plug messes that up - if it is off, people cannot turn the light on by turning it on at the lamp - and if the light socket is turned off, remotely turning the smart plug on still doesn’t turn the light on. Even worse, if someone thinks they are turning the light on at the socket but the smart plug is off and the socket is switched on, they are actually turning the light off, so if you then turn the smart plug on, you have to tell them to try turning the light on AGAIN to actually turn it on.
For a wife that does not like automation, and you are working on getting automation set up within the home and it doesn’t work flawlessly, the WAF (Wife Approval Factor) is not only very low going into negative territory, but worse than that -
The only wifi light bulb socket switch for a table lamp I can find for sale are ones that screw into the old socket instead, so you have the same problem as you do with a smart wall plug. Even if you get a lamp socket that doesn’t have a switch and screw the smart wifi bulb socket into that, many of these units don’t even have a physical switch on them… Ugh!
So that’s what I’m looking for - a smart replacement, not an add-on… I tried to work through doing it myself within the base of a lamp with a relay in the base of the lamp, but in that case you are forced to replace the wire to the outlet as well, at the very minimum to include the ground wire… but also, many table lamp bases are not big enough. So you could then put the relay at the plug, but for this to work you then need a table lamp electrical cord with four leads - two for the bulb and two for the switch… - argh!
Thoughts?
