Sonof zigbee smart switch for dumb bulbs?

[reg.phenna]

I am looking at adding all my houselights into my home assistant setup.
I cannot see for sure that installing these switches or similar will work with regular bulbs rather than smart bulbs!
Can someone confirm this or suggest an alternative that doesn’t involve switching out the bulbs?

[ferbulous (Shaq)]

Do you have smart bulbs installed now?

[reg.phenna]

Some but not throughout the house.

[dan-shaqfu (Dan)]

Maybe this discussion is interesting for you:

How to change a physics swtich into a wireless switch?

Hey there. I am new to HA. I am using ZHA integration. And I have a smart bulb and a smart switch. I wired three wire to the switch, which are L, N and L1 (wired to the bulb). And I add them to my HA via ZHA. Now I can control the smart light’s brightness and on/off from my HA dashboard. I can also trigger the smart switch from my HA dashboard or directly press the physics button. I can hear click sound when I trigger the smart switch, which I believe is the relay in the smart switch turing on …

In case you have a mix of smart/dumb bulbs you will need a switch which is capable to toggle your mains power to the dumb bulb. If you replace the dumb bulb by a smart one one day, you could decouple the switch (see the thread posted above for details on that) and use the switch as smart switch only (not toggling mains anymore). So check if decoupling is possible for your favorite switch.

I personally would not physically switch off smart bulbs since they will lose their repeater functionality then. This again might render some other devices as offline because their uplink is missing. Zigbee devices do not always chose the nearest device for coupling so you might have unexpected results/instable mesh then. But this really depends on your setup.

Dan

[reg.phenna]

Thanks for the info.
All my smart bulbs are in lamps, but ceiling mounted lights are all dumb.
It seems I can therefore go ahead and buy the smart switches for this purpose.
Next I need to find ones that can be mounted by replkacing existing dumb switches in the UK.

Can anyone suggest a brand for these as a few I have found on amazone/aliexpress look like they may not fit the back box!

[dan-shaqfu (Dan)]

I think you have two options:

• keep your physical switches but enhance them with some zigbee/shelly switch. They should fit in your wallbox (pls check that, i am just guessing)
  So maybe something like that:
  SONOFF ZBMINIL2 Zigbee Smart Switch
  https://amzn.eu/d/geNuuJl
  I use two of them to switch off outdoor lights in case their motion sensor goes nuts due to rain/wind. They can do 6A@230V which is fine for me.
• switch to full featured smart buttons/switches

At least here in .de the latter option is often difficult, especially if you want to keep/mix your setup with existing sockets in one frame for example. I cannot recommend anything since I dont know the situation in UK. Here even the same manufacturers (like Jung, Gira etc) have different series not compatible with each other. So finding smart switches mechanically fitting to the ones used in your house is often a frustrating process. Maybe someone here can recommend compatible options for the UK?