We’re renovating our new apartment, so I’ve been toying with HomeAssistant and ZWave in preparation. I’ve had a few LIFX bulbs for several years and I’m happy with them, so I want to go down that direction.
My understanding is that when it comes to smart dimmable light, you essentially have to choose between smart bulbs paired with non-dimmer switches (smart or otherwise) or dumb bulbs paired with smart switches. And if you want colored bulbs where you can control the color, you have to go with smart lights.
Most people recommend to then have on/off switches so you can still physically turn the load of the smart lights on or off, but only use that when everything else fails (you broke your home internet and thus you can’t turn off the lights anymore). There’s devices out there that then plug on top of the toggle and act as ZWave buttons, but they’re pretty limited in functionality compared to some of the nicer ZWave scene controllers or other switches.
As far as I know, nobody makes a wall-mountable switch that acts purely as a ZWave switch or scene controller in the normal case, but still allows you as a backup to physically switch off the load as a last resort.
So my plan for now is to put in one gang box for one LIFX light:
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a toggle switch to which the light is connected as the load
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a protector on top to make it hard to use the toggle (for example https://www.amazon.com/Magnetic-Switch-Outlett-Toggle-Switches/dp/B002X88GYY/)
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a zwave scene controller next to it with the load disconnected (for example, the HomeSeer switch: https://shop.homeseer.com/collections/lighting/products/hsws200)
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integration between the zwave switch, home assistant and the LIFX light (I already have this working in my test setup)
Am I missing something obvious? Does anyone see a better approach if I want to go with smart bulbs? Does anyone know why there aren’t individual zwave switches/scene controllers that have the zwave controls as their primary function but switching off loads as a backup somehow?