My parents are building a new house and I tasked myself with the home automation part as most offers by third parties were outrageously expensive and proprietary. I figured out most things but I have some hardware left on my purchase list: Light switches (on/off) and blind switches (up/down + stop).
I’ve been looking around for a bit but I can’t decide what is right and what works best with HA. Does anyone have recommendations for these types of switches? Anything in particular to look out for when buying these? And which protocol would be better? WiFi or ZigBee? There will be an access point on each floor, so WiFi connectivity should be good but I got some ZigBee dongle laying around that I don’t use. The place is located in Switzerland if that can help, but we’re also open to order hardware from abroad even if it takes time to arrive (the deadline of the construction is still a some months ahead + the usual construction delays).
I‘d go for Zigbee, as it is a meshed network protocol with high interoperability. It it optimized for reliability and has self-healing/self-optimizing capabilities.
Wi-Fi is a network for high volume, fast transfer. There is no such thing as a common standard for IoT interoperability. In the end, you require the devices to provide a documented API, supported by HA.
Just a general thought on your topic.
If I were about building a new house, I’d not go down the wireless route.
There will be a time when protocols, either WiFi 4 or Zigbee 3 will be deprecated and maybe even left vulnerable. You then probably need to replace all your switches.
Another argument would be higher energy consumption.
I’d use dumb switches, pull the relevant wires to a central place and do the hardwired sensing and switching there.
I bought a dumb home some years ago and extended it with a bunch of cheap wireless devices via WiFi (Shelly, Sonoff) as well as ZigBee (Xiaomi, Ikea, Osram/Ledvance).
Both wireless solutions work out well for me right now (4 WiFi Repeaters, 1 ZigBee Repeater) but I had to upgrade the ZigBee router since I went for a cheap entry level one in the beginning which had pretty limited range and other unsatisfying behavior.
If you go for ZigBee I would recommend choose a good router to get satisfiying results. I’m currently running the ZZH dongle.