Soon I’ll have to do my new home and I’m researching the best way to make my lights smart.
First I decided to just find good smart switches but it turns up that the design lines for these are quite limited and at the same time they are quite pricy.
I am thinking of combining regulator light switches with wireless relay mounted behind. I saw two options, one is Zwave based - Fibaro realy and second is zigbee - aqara relay. Both seems to be able to handle 2 and 3 way from what I can read.
Does anyone have experience with such setup?
Is it reliable solution?
What else would you recommend me for making the lights smart?
You can get Sonoff Touch for about $10, which is the cheapest you can go. Newer versions might support the “3rd party API”, but current versions require some soldering skills in order to be flashed. Being “touch” it doesn’t feel like a proper switch.
For most smart switches (including the Sonoff Touch) you’ll need neutral wire, which isn’t available in most countries. So if you don’t have neutral wires to your light switches, and you can’t get a neutral wire from the junction box, your choices are quite limited.
Xiaomi has a no neutral switch option (Zigbee powered) and should work with most lights (as long as they use below 800w).
I would recommend going with a third party gateway (such as Zigbee2MQTT) instead of the Xiaomi gateway for both performance and data confidentiality/security purposes.
There is absolutely no need to search for specific 2/3 way capable gear: once integrated in HA you can use any number of switches to toggle the one that is physically controlling the light so only one wired switch per light is sufficient. Nice part is that the other switches used for toggling the one connected to the light can be of any type (either wired or wireless or of different wireless standards such as Zigbee/Zwave/Wifi/433Mhz or different manufacturers) as long as long as they’re all included in HA.