Stop Zigbee Mains powered device from being a router? (ZHA)

Your solution is flawed. If you both want RGB tunable bulbs and a switch that does not cut power, use wireless battery powered Zigbee switches / dimmers and connect the Zigbee bulbs so that they always have power. After that you can bind them directly to the switches / dimmers and that way make sure they are controlable even if HA is down.

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I don’t think this works. Can you explain the process please?

I had to read your post 3 times and still can’t grasp why you would resort to this.

At best, it’s an XY Problem. At worst, it’s a fundamental misunderstanding of how zigbee works, which leads you state that “it is a zigbee limitation that developers do not want to address because they feel it goes against the zigbee “philosophical theory”, but I think this is not correct”

First things first - you’re trying to work around the issue of HA being unavailable…by using an HA automation (which relies on HA being available). I don’t know what you did to test this, but it’s not gonna work.

Secondly, you’re assuming that if HA goes down, then Zigbee will go down with it. It might be true for ZHA, but is entirely possible to run Z2MQTT and MQTT on standalone hardware which runs independently from HA.

Third, you’re using a smart switch with smart bulbs. Fine, I get it - you want to enjoy the “RGB dimming fun” until the novelty wears out in a week. At the very least get a switch which supports decoupled mode so you can manually reset it back to normal switch mode if your zigbee mesh should die.

Fourth, what @fleskefjes was trying to tell you was that you don’t need Wifi smart switches - you just need to find a zigbee switch/bulb combination that support zigbee binding.

Finally, you’re trying to focus too hard on switching a router bulb into an end device, when Sengled bulbs were created as end devices for this specific purpose. They’re even mentioned further up in this thread, so all you had to do was scroll up and read instead of trying to reinvent the wheel.

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Not sure why you think it will not work, but @ShadowFist explained it very good. Zigbee binding works.

If you want Zigbee bulbs that don’t route, buy Sengled bulbs.

Thank You all for your advices. I know that if I change bulbs to Sengled it will work. I just wanted to make it working with the the cheap AliExpress ones.
I’m a beginner here, but I have the best intentions, and I really appreciate your help!
I’m also a IT engineer with 40y experience, trying complicated things is an hobby :slight_smile:

I would just like to throw in my two cents here:

I think there is a legit use-case for putting smart bulbs behind dumb switches: When retrofitting using existing wiring.

I just put two smart bulbs into a circuit that has other dumb lights on it too. The smart bulbs let me change colour temperature and brightness of the new bulbs along with the other lamps in the room, but the wiring in the wall is still fundamentally switched by the wall switch.
Having the ability to disable routing on specific devices would be a useful feature for this use-case.

In my case, I think it doesn’t actually cause me an issue since the zigbee mesh is dense enough that there are alternative routes available when the switched lights get turned off.

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If it works, it works. It’s just not how it was intended, and even though it may work now, it might not in the future. Some devices are very susceptible to “their router” going offline, and don’t migrate to another router (or only after hours or days).