yes, this is why I asked before!
I forgot to mention I live in Austria / Europe. Hence, I seem to be out of luck with the Lutron Caseta solution. At least they are not mentioned in the german amazon.de.
The RunLessWire solution looks also really interesting. But a bit pricey though.
I assume I would choose the Philips Hue version and integrate with Z2M.
May I ask, what had been the hickups the other solutions fell below the SO AL?
Lost connections?
Unreliable switches?
You might explore the new z-wave stuff, like the Caseta stuff it runs sub gigahertz so can get thru those thick walls better. Inovelli has some interesting stuff, but not sure if they have EU products. Aeotec, also some neat stuff. Both neutral optional. I have been away from the z-wave stuff for a pretty long time, but they seems to have recovered from their closed ways and have some innovative companies and products : https://z-wavealliance.org/
If the Home Automation industry give a 
ugly award each year, I am sure the Hue switch has won hands down. It works, but yuck. That is why the RunLessWire dimmer looked interesting. Yes bummer on the lack of Caseta support in EU, because another nice part of its system are the very nice looking and functional Pico remotes. If there is a polar opposite to the Hue switches, it is the Pico.
I’ve been pretty lucky with the wireless spectrum, a good Mikrotik mesh wifi has been a great based and no conflicts with zigbee or bluetooth devices.
The worst fail was with Shelly plugs randomly powering off, I think there was a bug in their wifi firmware for about six months. But this put a pretty bad taste in my mouth for them, combined with their support forums being on Facebook 
. That is unfortunate, because I think they do some decent engineering.
Again been lucky on the mechanical front, no fails there, but no kids 
I try to go with vetted products that are in walls or permanently wired, only magic smoke has been due to my stupid wiring mistakes.
I also have the Casetta (in the US). They are non-neutral, which means current always going through lights and expensive. They do work well and now much easier to add to homeassistant.
Regarding zigbee (I am just learning this, so could be wrong). For non-3way, you would want a 1-gang at every switch (unless have two switches in the same box, then can use a 2-gang to save some money). Zigbee is nice because I think you can join multiple lights/switches to a group and zigbee takes care of syncing them–so will still work when homeassistant is down.
I need to learn about the 3way. You may be able to keep the dumb 3way switch away from the load wire, thus saving a device. But not 100% sure. In the US, I think it requires re-writing the travelers. I keep meaning to figure this out, but life gets in the way. You may not be able to put a zigbee device at the 3-way switch, because it always needs power. If the other switch removes the power, it will not function.
I hope to figure this out soon, or maybe an expert will chime in.
Casetta will not work with 3-way. You need to bypass the 3 way switch (directions are included in the package if I remember). Then put a Pico remote where you want 3-way control.
I think the Caseta ‘Pro’ wall switch might have more 3-way options, but it requires a neutral. And even more expensive.
@jazzyisj just pointed me to this post at the Inovelli web site announcing work on a zigbee wall switch. All I can say from reading what they hope to accomplish in terms of options and functions is WOW! I hope they are able to get it UL certified, into production and available for purchase before the end of time… @EspWhaleSong I’m again not sure of Inovelli works in the EU market. But if so, do give this company a look, some pretty good thinking and engineering appears to be going on there.
I’ve had two old houses here in the States (one built in 1886 and the other built in 1916), lathe and plaster walls, so a bit less trouble putting in new work. Redid the electrical so that there are neutrals in every switch location and got rid of some charming aluminum wire in the process (as well as tube and wrap in the attic).
Long story short: I used Honeywell, Zooz, and GE Z-Wave units on mine. I don’t know how available those where you are.
why?
AFAIK the difference to the ZigBee smart light switches suggested by jaaem is mainly that Shelly relies on WiFi instead of ZigBee. This would pollute my IP address space a bit, but would be no big issue.
Like jaaem mentioned, this sounds very compelling:
In hindsight, this is what we should have done before moving in as well. But we had been under severe time pressure and it hadn’t been a real option.
It’s really depends. Online I can get everything, but local it’s a different story. It’s not bad, but German brands are much more available, but also really expensive.
I think I will stay with ZigBee for now, as it seems to work reliable currently. Only interferrence with Bluetooth is annoying sometimes. Looking at my Magic Mouse currently… But since switching to the Sonoff 3.0 dongle I can’t remember to have had problems anymore.
You are right with that for sure. Didn’t think about this! Thanks for pointing this out.
I just took a look into the manifold box (is it called like that?) above the second 3 way light switch and I have all the wires I need for the 1 gang switch module to be placed there.
Regarding Casetta and also Shally non neutral solutions: I really don’t like the idea to add additional consumers parallel to low power LED lights to make them work! That’s really absurd. Better to add this one wire and call it a day.
@dproffer The Inovelli switch really sounds interesting. But skimming over their really good product development information updates, this sound’s to arrive earliest this coming autumn/winter. I think this is too long to wait for.
Currently it really looks like I will settle with the ZigBee switch modules @jaaem mentioned.
They fit into my current setup, are easy to install and are open to introduce motion detection and other stuff over MQTT.
This will my lighting pilot project.
Thanks for all your input so far!
Yes, Z-Wave seems to be a bit better in radio terms. But I think the greater range of choice had been the reason to go the ZigBee route initially. Maybe this changes, but for now I will stay in ZigBee land.
Yes, it’s an urgent need designers enter this area as well. Looking at software frontends, it’s only the last decade it got pretty. Now everybody expects it to have nice user interfaces. Home Automation (at least the affordable one) is still in its infant’s shoes.
I have a FritzBox mesh here. It’s a german product, very popular here. It run’s 5 Ghz and 2.4 Ghz which is really fine. But as @jaaem mentioned, staying on ZigBee should make grouping without HA possible. I have to look into this, but this really would be a benefit.
This sounds bad. But also like it’s in their past. FB support for sure is a bummer! But obviously it works. People seem to appreciate it.
I also will never understand why many people prefer discord and FB over a forum like this here in HA. All the historical information is lost. It’s not searchable and only discord and FB benefit from the data. 
No kids as well. But a dog. But Light switches are for sure above his destruction horizon!
Vetted would be really nice, but there isn’t much here in Austria which isn’t blowing the budget.
It looks like KNX bus is THE standard here in german speaking area (Germany, Austria, Switzerland). It’s 30 years old, everything wired with low voltage (it’s for sure a reliability benefit, but hard to introduce in old buildings) and all communication is unencrypted. They have some security measurements though. No idea how good this is really. But there are only a hand full providers, the pricing is what we call Apothekerpreise which means pharmacy leveled priced…
Thanks for your detailed report!
Hey 
!
Just wanted to set some things about KNX straight here:
Thanks for pointing out!
It’s so easy to lose overview… Didn’t want to spread misinformation. Obviously I stopped my research before looking up manufacturers, as it wouldn’t have fit my needs.
Just also wanted to point out, there is also a wireless protocol KNX RF introduced. I assume it’s also not much available for it.
I just saw your github. Obviously you are really into KNX
Are you also related to the winery?
This would give a solid base for further discussions! 
Yeah Knx RF is not very common. It’s also only useable in conjunction with wired Knx devices, not standalone afaik.
Well it seems I did fall into a rabbit hole.
My brother is the winemaker 
Neutral or not, ALL wired smart switches have some constant power draw.
I looked at this a while back. Caseta, zigbee, zwave were all well under 0.5 watts. The wifi switches were topping out around 1.5 watts.
Comparing the power cost difference from worst to best performer, it may take decades to recover the cost of pulling that wire. Likely lifetimes if not a DIY job.
Some loads are not friendly to the no-neutral solutions and there are other reasons to pull a neutral. Power savings would not be near the top of the list, even at EU rates.
@jerrm for sure you are right. I will pull the wires myself, but I don’t like to have a consumer parallel to LED lights… 
Why Shelly stuff
cause
fair price easy to install
can leave solfware as is or you can put tasmota or ESPhome and have some real fun
You might want to review some of the issues and discussion on this github below. I used their tool to move 7 of 8 shelly us plugs to tasmota, one would not move. And I think they are moving to esp32 on their newer products, which appear to cause some additional issues.
I still have several Shelly devices successfully working with their Mongoose firmware. For example I have several of the PM1 devices which have over current and temperature limiters in their native firmware, I am pretty sure I never found a way to know if these functions worked or how to use them if I converted the device to one of the other firmwares. So they remain on native firmware, and continue to work fine. My big lesson from my experience with the Shelly Plug US devices was that if you have firmware that is running on a home automation device and it is working, DON’T upgrade! As I said, I have liked the Shelly hardware designs, but just struggle a lot for a period with some of the firmware, and I really was not a fan of the Facebook support ‘Forums’.
As I said, good hunting! I look forward to following your adventures here on the forums. Hope you can get some of @farmio brother’s 
. I have found my home automation work works much better with the proper application of &
. 
Apothekerpreise side of home automation, this is an interesting challenge and often very frustrating. I just purchased 2 tuya zigbee base light sensors because I wanted to explore some ideas around setting light temperatures based on tod and outdoor lighting conditions. And these were ‘relative’ inexpensive compared to Hue motion sensors I have used for motion in the past (but also have a light sensor). Well, you get what you pay for… I find these Tuya sensors spit out some incomprehensible number between 0 and 1000. One guy on github tells me that on the native Tuya hub the numbers show up as a percentage! I don’t care what language you speak, maths is maths. And bad engineering and software often comes as an inverse to price often.
As far as I know the only place percentage goes above 100 is politics 
So two more devices sent to the ‘e-waste’ drawer in the desk and the order in for the Hue devices 
.
I think you mentioned using zigbee2mqtt for your zigbee, I have just restarted using it after migrating away to ZHA a while back. And I will say it is the leader as place of reliable operation and still hacking around in home automation. With any Zigbee setup, getting a good coordinator (a TI CC2652) mounted high and in the clear with a couple good router devices (TI CC2530 in my case) has made for a solid and fun setup to work with (other than the Tuya light sensor 
).
Had been backcountry skiing with some friends last days. For sure, not only home automation works better with some or
Today the AVATTO zigbee light switch modules arrived… I am really curious, but now have to find some time where I can switch of the electricity and start to play around with them. I am really curious!
I will report back then.
Currently tinkering around with some ESP32 and ESP8266 for temperature monitoring of our ancient oil heating and aparrel transfer press… My first ESP8266 ESP-01 with DS18B20 sensors. 
Good time to ‘disconnect’ from the 
and 
!
The esp-world is very interesting, from Tasmota to ESPHome to native code with Arduino libs, ESP libs or MicroPython allows creating some interesting solutions.
While I am still debating the safety of this board in ‘production’ use, I am finding it very interesting. A mains powered esp32 in a form factor that fits in a USA wall box for USD 9 with shipping cost. You might try a couple, delivery was under 2 weeks to USA. I can experiment with attaching stuff to it with it powered by low voltage and disconnected from mains using a usb serial programmer and then when I have something working, disconnect from usb and computer and power with mains (then can change code using OTA updates).
If you get your press working, queue me up for a tee-shirt 
I’m interested to hear your experience with the AVATTO no-neutral solution, I have been experimenting and finding some mixed results:
AC Powered 1R ESP32-WROOM WIFI Bluetooth BLE Single Relay Development Board Module
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