I would say pricing is bang on. Personally not bothered about an app, you’ll severely limit your market without it though, but also be wary of committing to one open source solution as they can easily fall out of favour and your market vanish.
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With you, yep, that should work but be very careful and mark your wiring clearly as you go, technically (legally) you’d be breaking every rule in the book 
Agree price seems good. Looking forward to seeing what you can offer.
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Those Xiaomi Aqara switches look very interesting for UK light switches without neutral wires. I assume you can read back the status of the switch. Only downside is they’re not CE marked, and you have no idea whether or not they meet the regulations. If they burn your house down then the insurance company may not pay out.
Personally I’m using energenie mihome 433 MHz wall switches which you can get from Screwfix from about £17 they also do them for little more with chrome and silver front. But are only single gang at the moment. The switch is for the upstairs landing, and I’m using an Amazon dash button downstairs to turn the light on and off, obviously upstairs you just use the button on the wall switch. Only downside is home assistant has no idea what the position of switch is any given point.
To control the lights I’m using about £10 worth of electronics for a MQTT to 433mhz transmitter bridge. Basically just LEGO bricks that you stick together. https://github.com/Genestealer/ESP8266-433Mhz-Controller-Gateway
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Indeed, this is a genuine concern - especially for the family… The insurance is an after the event concern, so secondary but still concerning. Is this actually a true statement? Does “anything” without a CE mark invalidate ones insurance home/ life insurance?
Depend on your country regulation I guess.
I know taht in France it will invalidate the insurance only if it can be proven that this specific device causes the fire. Otherwise not.
And the insurance still need to investigate enough to find which device that was and that it was not CE certified… I guess in reality they barely try to track the exact cause and model of an item causing a fire.
Consider that the lack of CE marking means a lack of CE/BSI safety approval, their would need to be evidence proving conformity to various EU directives. I can assume an insurance company leaping on this (i.e. - no CE accreditation) as a reason not to pay out in the event of something going wrong.
CE marking is complex, but in essence, it’s applied by the manufacturer to say their product complies with EU safety, health and environmental requirements.
It is a legal requirement for most products sold/distributed in and to the UK and failure to comply will mean having to remove the product off the market and the seller may also be liable for a fine and imprisonment.
@darktowerhosting You need to make sure you get the right paperwork together:
If you are importing a product that is from a third country you have to check that the manufacturer outside the EU has undertaken the necessary steps. You must check that the documentation is available.
Well my switches have arrived from China warehouse, but the hub hasn’t arrived from the EU warehouse. Frustrating!
And the hub arrived today. Bought a travel adapter so will set it up over the weekend.
It all depends on what you are trying to accomplish with your smart switches.
If the internet goes down I still want control of my stuff (so that’s ‘smart things’ and similar out the window)
If my hub goes down I still want control of my stuff (so that’s most kit that doesn’t use current installed switches)
I want to be able to cover circuits that have 2, 3 or 4 gang switches.
So my solution seems to be z-wave dimmers
It has a pair of contacts that operate at ELV (anything less than 24v) so you don’t need earth wires (UNLESS your circuit passes through ANY box containing mains (actually anything MORE than ELV)) and the dimmer has a pair of contact points which can be configured for momentary or toggle action
This means that you can control the switch from the hub (or a browser) AND from the standard switch (so the wife doesn’t even know). Then you can do clever stuff with it.
You can set the hub to vary brightness by time of day, switch the light on/off at certain times or just of after (say) 10 mins
If you don’t have a neutral in your back box, put it in the rose (or but a fibaro one that will operate two wire)
This allows you to buy dumb bulbs (energy efficient dimmable ~ £6) rather than replaceable smart ones (cheapest are £15 Ikea Tradfri but can cost up to about £50 hue)
And I would tend to agree with Richard in that anything NOT CE marked will land you in a heap of trouble, especially if someone dies as a result of any incident.
Mutt
I’m also looking at options for UK switches, as I’m about to refurbish a house, I’ve worked out a list of requirements and a few options below.
I’ve logically split out my lighting into 2 groups, core & peripheral. Core lights will most likely be ceiling downlights, and will require local switches which need to work 100% of the time (as well as software controls). Peripheral lights are everything else, and I’m more flexible with what I use for those as they don’t need 100% reliability. The following is for core
Requirements:
- Physical lightswitches which work if/when network/server/internet is down
- Legal to install in the UK (CE certified)
- Able to communicate 2-way with HASS
- No 2-way wiring, all 2-way complexity will be handled in software
- Value for money. (Ill defined requirement, but I don’t want to spend money for the sake of it!)
- Saleable / swappable in the future. If I come to sell the house I’d like it to work with a minimal amount of hardware left behind.
Options which don’t work:
- Fails on
Requirement 1Decoupling switching of circuits from HASS sensors, using flic or Xiaomi buttons as light switches - Fails on
Requirement 2Sonoff touch - Fails on
Requirement 5Traditional Home Automation star-wired lighting (e.g. Rako, Lutron, Loxone) - proprietary & expensive
Potential Options:
- Den - although price, availability & API are all still unknown
- zwave - either a Fibaro dimmer 2 or Aeotec nano, with a 2-gang retractive switch connected to s1 & s2. If I’ve understood it correctly, s2 events (e.g. single, double, long push) can be handled by HASS and used as triggers for automations.
These are the only options I’ve come up with so far, keen to hear if anyone else has any other ideas.
I think yor rewquirement 1 and 4 won’t work in conjunction.
Unless… you get one of the wired Xiaomi lights per light, and additional ones would be wireless. If Hassio was down, only the wired one would work.
This might be good enough.
Equally, it might still fail on requirement 2.
Is the Sonoff Touch definitely not CE approved, just about everything else is including the Basic?
The Den switch is now rolling out - https://getden.co.uk/ - there’s no official API yet, so no home assistant integration, but early reviews seem to say the product works well and is a straight simple replacement in the UK
Re the DEN stuff:
They’ve not stated what they use to communicate, but i get the feeling it may be Zigbee.
(Okay, so they don’t say on their site what the protocol is but someone in another forum contacted them and they confirmed it’s Zigbee)
There’s every possibility these could be integrated in to zigbee2mqtt and then in to homeassistant. Watching with interest as these are definitely something i’ve been looking at getting but would rather not spend the money on a hub. Trying to go hub free…
Seems what’s needed is dimmer switches in every combination up to 3 way and up to 4 gang, which have a red flap marked ‘override’ or something, under this flap is a 3way switch that in the middle is the default (home-automation controlled setting, marked ‘HA’) , up is ‘force on’ and down is ‘force off’
so that in the event of technology failure you have that hard-wired override option, clearly there, but under a red flap or something should be enough to put off unneccessary use.
Wiser (Merten) switches are being released in the UK later this year. They have many combinations of switch. I have the Drayton Wiser for heating and have been happy with that, so will wait to see if this shall provide what I need in a switch.
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ohhh… the Wiser switches look awesome. Hopefully this will be good for UK lights + Hassio!
Cheers
Will.
They seem to require neutral which is no good in the UK…
Yes you are right, but they have not released these in the UK because the UK version required this modification, I have been advised that they are targeting Q4 for release of the UK variant of this product.
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