My family room has pretty poor lighting so we use lamps. Unfortunately none of the circuits in the room are attached to a switch. The previous owner had left a couple of Z-Wave (Honeywell I think) dimmers installed so I’ve begun wondering if I could use these switches and some smart outlets to avoid having to manually turn on all my lamps or figure out what it would cost to get the bottom receptacles on the switch.
My main question is whether or not something like this is possible with HA or if there’s a better solution out there. I’m concerned about the Instant status update section of the Z-Wave Getting Started docs. My understanding is that unless my wall switch supports the Association or CentralScene command classes as Controlled, I’d have to poll from HA to detect when I’ve physically toggled the switch. I’m not really attached to Z-wave other than there’s one switch here already and I’m fine ripping it out. Would a different protocol be more suited to accomplishing my goal?
You might be interested in Shelly WiFi devices, if you have a robust and reliable network.
There are 2 big advantages.
The first is that you can completely bypass HA for control, the i3 “scene controller” sits behind the light switch, and sends commands directly to the outlets using an HTTP URI request, response time is better than 50ms. If the HA server goes offline for any reason, the switch still controls the lights.
The other one is cost, they are quite inexpensive, outfitting the whole room will not break the bank.
Since they integrate with HA, you can still turn them off/on with automations, or have their activity trigger other automations. You can also control them with other types of switches/buttons/controllers that integrate with HA, I am using Lutron Pico remotes to control Shelly devices, even though they are competing platforms with no direct integration, HA as an intermediate step works flawlessly.
Shelly also makes a portable button with multi-press control, single and double taps can send different commands to different devices, etc. Useful if you want a method to control different lamps independently, but there is no switch in proximity (or when I am sitting on a couch without my phone)
This looks pretty promising. Ideally I’d like to avoid using WiFi but so far this seems the cleanest solution, especially if my understanding of the Z-Wave Instant Status Updates caveat is correct.
These are Zigbee, and the battery life’s not fantastic, but I use a handful around our home / office. Personally I integrate them w/ SmartThings and then ST into HA.
They’re typically $5-$10 each and can buy in bulk on eBay