This is my first post, as after much searching I have not found any references on this subject.
I have an Aqara wall switch that turns off a ceiling lamp with a smart bulb. I have created a switch/slider on a Home Assistant panel. The switch can turn the wall switch on/off and also dim the bulb with the slider when its on.
On the other hand, the wall switch has the option to turn the lamp on/off and does so correctly.
When I switch off from the switch on the Home Assistant panel, it switches off the lights and the wall switch without any problems and also dims the panel switch to indicate that the light is off.
On the contrary, when I turn off the light using the physical switch, it seems to cut off the power to the lamp bulbs, and then they do not seem to send the signal that they are off to HA, and the switch on the panel remains lit, so that even though it is off, it is not identified as off on the panel.
I have tried to automate this so that the switch on the panel turns off when the physical switch is turned off, but I haven’t been able to get it to work, and I’m not really advanced enough to know exactly how to do it.
I would appreciate any references on this matter.
I apologise if I have opened this thread when one already exists on the subject, but I have searched several times and have not found anything on it.
Smart switch and smart bulb together isn’t great.
I would (doesn’t mean it’s legal or safe) wire the switch to always power the bulb then use software to send switch command to bulb.
I had thought of that, but I’m not interested. For now, I’ll put up with it as it is until I can find an optimal solution. I know that when the power is cut, it’s difficult for the bulb to send commands to HA, but try to see if you can create an automation related to the power cut or something similar.
Ok…
Good luck.
As far as I know from reading here nobody else has found a solution to this.
And even if you do, at some point HA will notice the bulb isn’t responding and change the state you set to off to unavailable
Thanks again, I’ve already tried several automations and it’s true that they don’t work for the reason you mentioned, but hope is the last thing to be lost.
The thing is, the option of bypassing the power cut from the physical switch and creating a command to turn off the lights is a good idea, lI have implemented this in other secondary lights, but if HA fails, it would stop turning off this light that is the principal in the room, and that’s when my family, especially my wife, would become a bigger problem.
Some (but not all) of the smart switches have the mode that could decouple (a) the switching of power circuit and (b) the detection of the physical wall switch operations.
Meaning, when you physically toggle the switch on the wall, the brain of the smart switch would track the physical toggle switch on/off events, the brain could also control whether to open/close the internal power relay to control the bulbs. AND users can independently tell the brain whether the brain should tie the switch input to power relay output or not.
So IF your smart switch has this feature, you would be in a better position. You can setup the smart switch to never cut power to smart bulb (internal power relay always providing the power), and instead use on/off physical switch inputs, via automation (and thus not via the power relay), to tell smart bulb to go on/off.
The next step up, to address the scenario if/when the automation would not work and HA fails, is yet another less common feature that would tie the on/off wall switch inputs directly to the on/off of the smart bulb. This requires both the smart switch and the smart bulb being able to talk to each other directly, so they need to be under the same communication protocol, and they both need to support this feature. It’s called “binding” if both are zigbee devices, and “association” if z-wave.
Thread has this feature in the specs, but I’m don’t know about how vendors implement the feature, nor how Matter over Thread would change the behavior.
And I don’t know whether Matter over Wi-Fi has this or not.
Purely a summary at this point - you likely have known all of those already. Anyways hope this helps.
You are not supposed to combine a smart light with anything that cuts power to it.
It will cause more problems than just the light not working properly!
If you need a switch to work correctly, in the back of the switch you just bridge live and neutral to keep the light on constantly, and then look into the hue wall modules by Philips that will solve your problem by turning your light switch into a remote.
No, no, I meant bridge both sides of the live together and then both sides of the neutral together and do not connect anything else to either of those wires. The switch goes to a wall module / remote, not to the power wires.