Smart bulbs, dumb switches working when everything goes down

Hardware
1

Hi everyone, I have a question about wife approval.

Are there any smart bulbs or ceiling lights that will turn on when the physical (dumb) wall switch is flipped, even if the bulb was turned off via Home Assistant?

For example:

If I turn off the bulb through Home Assistant, then toggle the dumb wall switch off and back on, which models of bulb and ceiling lights will turn on?

Thanks!

2

The general Idea here is that you setup decoupled mode with the switch/relay that you install, this will allow control of the smart light and bulb without cutting power to the circuit that they need to stay online on the network that you have setup them up in.

Some also have a setting to have on/off set to opposite of current switch state so it reverses each use and is agnostic to state automation/dashboard.

3

Hi,

If you are talking about ceiling lights with an associated wall switch, then in my opinion you really have two options for your & everyone else’s sanity.

  1. Replace the entire wall switch with a smart switch.
  2. Install an inline smart relay behind the existing wall switch.
    Both these options allow for manual & HA control as you like & in this case you don’t care about the actual bulb.

I would recommend only using smart bulbs in lamps in locations that are not commonly manually controlled. If you do still need some manual control over the bulb you could add a smart button into the mix. I use this method for the bedside lamps in all my bedrooms & TV room. We know to not turn off those lamps & let HA do it’s thing but there is a small (zigbee in my case) button nearby for manual control if needed.

1 Like
4

I don’t know why no one has suggested this yet but Philips Hue bulbs have a “Power On Behavior” which does exactly that. Tells the light how to behave when it comes online again. The problem is it always does that regardless of the reason.

I’d wager though that if you have a generic Zigbee coordinator you could set up an automation where the trigger is the power loss. Then you just track time and if the time between the off-on is less than say 2 seconds you’re toggling, otherwise keep them off. That would help with things like actual power loss. I’ve had a couple of cases of getting flashbanged at 3 AM because of a power outage.

I’m very noobish when it comes to automations so someone else might have a more complete answer.

5

Specifically, the scenario in this example would not be happening, unfortunately.

If you the smart bulb is powered, and then you use HA to turn the smart bulb off, it is still powered.
And then, now if you flip the dumb wall switch, you would just power off the entire smart bulb. The light would not come on.

That said, the light however would come on if (a) you setup your smart bulb to be always on after power loss, and (b) if your wife flips the dumb switch again.
But that would require 2 flips, so wife approval would not be good / high.

The solution would be as the other suggested: you have 2 routes

  1. either do a smart switch with a dumb bulb,
  2. or do a smart switch and bind/associate the smart switch to your smart bulb. This route requires both your smart switch and smart bulb supporting the bind/associate feature, so that they can communicate to each other locally & directly.