Hello!
Any experiences with these switches?
Most of my switches don’t have a neutral wire, so I was starting to slowly install Lutron Caseta… but today I bumped into the SONOFF ZMB5 and I was wondering if anyone has used them and what’s their first impressions.
Interesting, they’ve even included detach relay feature. I’m surprised EU version isn’t out first
I’ve bought that switch but for whatever reason when I enable the detach relay feature, I can’t get any events from it so I can use to turn on/off the bulbs attached on it.
Anyone have any idea how to make it work? I’m using a separated installation of Z2M and not the HA add-on.
Thanks!
Interesting that they show that detached mode is not available on ZHA when that should really just be a setting in one of the clusters.
I’m seriously considering these switches for my home, especially because of the Detach Relay feature.
It’s a shame it’s not available in ZHA—it would be quite a hassle to migrate everything to Z2M just for that. Does anyone have any insight into why this feature isn’t working in ZHA?
Do they work by pressing the switch even if the zigbee network is down? Can the lights still be turned on and off?
Yeh you just need to get used to the logic, I had the same. I have a Hue Bulb with detached relay and it works fine. Constant power to the bulb and scene control from the switch.
You will see once you enable detached relay, the exposed entities in HA you will see a NEW entity “Toggle_L1” meaning rather than choose if L1 is ON or OFF, the choice for a detached switch is “when it toggles” state
Just to update everyone - I’ve made a PR with the fix to Z2M and it turns out the problem was fixed few weeks before it but it was in the dev branch. This is now merged on main and it work correctly.
However, we still have something not working. The group control. For example, one single button to toggle a group of Hue Bulbs thru Zigbee Groups. It is possible to do it with automations on HA, but if HA is unavailable, the lights won’t work. Ideally we should use Zigbee groups. It is not just faster, it actually makes the things more reliable (assuming you are using a dedicated hub and not a USB one attached to HA).
Yes, the new Toggle action was the problem. It wasn’t being captured on Z2M and pushed so HA can use it.
The Z2M build which now is released have the fix.
I have a ZBM5-1C-80/86 and a smart bulb, but cannot make the detach mode work with Zigbee2MQTT. I have the detach mode enabled and can control the bulb with its light entity when the relay switch is on. However, physically pressing the switch doesn’t do anything visible to me. I also do not see any entity “Toggle_L1” as it was suggested above, see the attached screenshot. As I understand I need an automation to turn on the light, which is triggered when the switch is physically pressed. If that’s true I am not sure what the trigger of this automation should be. Can anyone help me?
Thank you!
I figured it out. I was missing the neutral wire, which is necessary for the detach mode to work. I now tested the switch with a neutral wire and the detach mode works. On pressing the switch I get "action": "toggle" in the MQTT topic, which can be used in an automation.
When using it without neutral (which is how my house is wired), do you need to add a capacitor to the bulb or that’s no longer necessary? I might be completely outdated and the capacitors are a thing of the past…it’s what stopped me from moving to smart switches in the past. Thanks!
Some switches, like this ZBM5, or relays like ZBMINIL2 and so on, don’t need an external capacitor because the internal design allows it to operate without a neutral wire and without the need for an added capacitor.
Hi, the ZBMINIR2 integration for ZHA was fixed recently so that detach relay is supported. So I assumed it works the same with the ZBM5 switches. So bought some of them but it appears those still don’t support detach relay in ZHA. Anyone know if a fix is also planned for those switches, as Id assume it works conceptually same as what was fixed for the R2.
Cheers
yeah same issue here, zbm5 ZHA setup detatched mode not supported, I wonder where on the ZHA sub we could report this
