So I’m sure this question has been asked a ton of times, and apologies if I wasn’t able to find a proper answer. This seems like something that would be quite a common issue.
Basically, I have a few smart (wifi) lightbulbs and smart plugs with lights plugged in them in each room of my house. I currently switch my lights on and off using Alexa, while the wall-mounted dumb switch is kept constantly on.
With this setup, one Alexa command “turn on the living room lights” automatically turns on the ceiling lamp, a floor lamp, and some decorative lights all around the room, with some automations depending on the time of day.
Now I want to make all those lights work with a more traditional button press. Partly because sometimes I don’t want to have to call a voice command, partly to make it more convenient for guests. This implies using smart wireless switches. I recently bought an IKEA Rodret to try it out in one of my rooms, and it works perfectly turning my lights on and off with short press, long press or double press.
The issue now is that my Rodret switch is mounted on the wall right next to the dumb switch, and it’s ugly and confusing, especially for guests, who still use the dumb switch because that’s what normal people do.
I don’t use the dumb switch at all anymore, so I would like it to be hidden, but I still want to have it available if I ever need to turn the ceiling lights off completely (if I leave the house for a few days or if I need to change the bulb or the light fixture).
How do I go about making this happen? Is there any smart/dumb switch combination that I haven’t heard of? Or maybe a recessed dumb switch with the smart switch on top? I’m curious to hear how you achieved that.
If you want to go down the zigbee route there are quite a lot of wall switches around to replace conventional switches. They are wired into the old lighting circuit, so they work as conventional manual switches as well connecting to HA. If you get a two or three gang switch you can have one operating conventional lights and the others controlling zigbee devices.
There’s some examples here:
If you go the full Hue, their battery powered switches can be mounted over the old conventional switch.
I had the same issue when I moved, decided to ditch (or re-use in other places) the smart bulbs I had and went for both in-wall and wall-mounted dimmers depending on the room. Living room has a zigbee wireless switch connected to two different in-wall dimmers that control 12 (6 each) dumb bulbs, one I re-used the existing dumb switch and placed a spring in it so it works as a dimmer, and finally on the rest of the rooms I use the wall mounted ones that you turn to dim.
Happy with the choice, everything looks stock but is smart.
They look like this:
You can eliminate secondary switch (like the rodret) and just use the main switch by replacing with a smart one like cloudfree switches. Enable detached mode (keeps the smart bulbs on), from there you can use switch/button action as triggers to control the smart lights.
Why would anyone want this after Philips Hue/Signify was spitting into the faces of their paying customers?
Does “the internet” really forget that fast? How long was it? 3 weeks, 4 weeks? 2 month, that’s like 2 decades in the www… indeeed most humans forgot already!
