Tips for a (unicorn?) switch

Hardware
1

Hi All,

I’m relatively new to HA, looking to solve a somewhat erratic lighting situation in my Victorian UK house. After a lot of research here, on Reddit and YouTube I’ve decided to ask for help.

In the kitchen/dining area there are three circuits of downlights (which I find ugly) with individual switches, as well as stair lights.

I’ve made decent progress with two circuits, combining them to one switch using zigbee devices, but I’m banging my head agains the wall with the last one because of a pretty ambitious list of requirements:

  • Circuit is “no neutral” and currently controls 9x GU10 dumb bulbs in a 3x3 grid above the dining table.
  • I want to replace all the bulbs with smart ones, and make the middle light a pendant.
  • To control this I want a 2-gang switch where one button turns on all the lights on the floor, and the second button triggers a “dining” scene where all downlights are either off or dimmed right down - with just the pendant casting lovely soft light.

The ideal scenario seems to be a 2-gang switch in detached mode that that somehow still works with smart bulbs and can be easily reset to toggle mode in the event of HA outage. So far I’ve looked at Sonoff ZBM5 and Aqara.

Has anyone ever seen something like this? Or is there a way of rigging Shelly relays to work with all these criteria?

Any and all tips very welcome!

2

Sorry to burst your bubble, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen a no-neutral switch or relay which still works when you enable decoupled mode.

Your best bet is to get an electrician & ask him to use the switched live cable to pull another switched live + neutral to your switch location. Should be a 20 minute job, unless the cables are stapled.

3

Another option is tuya switches, you can still install custom firmware to enable detach relay, binding and other features

There’s a few no neutral devices listed here

You can just bind all the zigbee lights to the first gang, and 2nd gang to trigger the scene in HA

4

The problem isn’t the lack of availability of no-neutral switches which support decoupled mode. It’s due to the fact that they don’t pull parasite power from the bulbs when using no neutral + decoupled mode with smart bulbs.

There are multiple forum posts about this, and suppliers like Aqara explicitly warn you that you need to wire in a neutral when using with smart bulbs:

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Frankly, if Aqara haven’t figured this out, I doubt Tuya have (even with that custom firmware). I’m happy to be proven wrong, but easiest way out is to simply pull a neutral to the switch location.

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