I’m planning to add more Philips Hue lights and integrate them with HA + Zigbee2MQTT. It works well with a test ceiling light I already set up, but there’s one thing I haven’t figured out yet:
How can I keep basic physical switch functionality for the Hue lights if Home Assistant goes down or becomes unreachable?
My worst-case scenario: I’m on a business trip, HA fails, and my family can’t turn the lights on or off.
Is there a recommended best-practice setup to ensure the lights remain usable independently of HA?
Another (in my opinion better) option would be to ditch the smart bulbs, use smart dimmers / switches and dumb bulbs but then you lose RGB and I don’t know how deep you are into the Hue ecosystem.
Okay, so binding the dimmer to the light seems like the way to go.
I’m not really deep into the Hue ecosystem yet. The main reason I’m leaning toward their ceiling fixtures is simply because the design and light quality are well-accepted by the family.
That is correct, but it has some limitiations (mainly device support) so you need to test it. I use it on less-known hardware here with success.
If you basically are starting out I would absolutely look into the option of smart dimmers / switches instead of using Hue. You won’t need double dimmers / switches for example, and no issues with lights going offline because someone used the wrong switch. Usually it’s cheaper too.
I’ve had good success with the Inovelli Blue range. They support both binding to devices and groups, support smart / decoupled mode, and work well in my tests with Hue lights. I’m about to install a whole bunch of Hue LED pucks (they are one of the only options with RGB and no cloud dependency) paired with a few Inovelli switches so we’ll see how well they scale!
This is one of the reasons I chose to go with Gledopto downlights as the Pro versions work on both RF frequency as well as Zigbee. This allows the lights to be controlled via a remote should HA ever go down.
