ZigBee control UK

Configuration
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Hi all,

Apologies if this asked and answered. TBH I’m new to this and am not sure I’ve understood what I’ve read in many different posts. So, before I spend too much time / money on this …

I’m in the UK, I have a couple of hue bulbs and am planning to get some tradfri ones. Also, very interested in new tradfri power “control outlet”. I’m intending to run Home Assistant on a small pc I have lying around (used to run Kodi but I don’t use that any more), probably on Ubuntu.

  1. I think I can buy a ConBee USB adaptor and use deCONZ integration with HA to control a range of ZigBee devices (so long as they’re on the deCONZ supported device list) is that right?

  2. I assume I can run deCONZ on the same pc?

  3. With this, can I then control them from HA and (via HA & Home Assistant Cloud) with Google Assistant?

  4. Can other people in my house use Google Assistant to control things (we have voice recognition on) without a load of extra config?

  5. Can I leave Hue and Tradfri hubs switched off? Too many hubs.

  6. If what I’ve said above is true, is there any benefit or reason to look at zigbee2mqtt instead?

Sorry for so many questions, but I’m really keen to get one platform to control everything and HA looks like that but if I’ve misunderstood how it works I’d sooner know I was barking up the wrong tree before I get too annoyed, banging my head against a brick wall!

Thanks in advance

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  1. Yes, and new devices are added all the time. The list might not even be up to date
  2. Yes
  3. Yes, you can control most entities with Google assistant I think. It has nothing to do with deCONZ since the communication goes via Home assistant.
  4. Don’t know
  5. Yes, deCONZ can replace both Hue and Trådfri hubs
  6. zigbee2mqtt is same same but different to deCONZ. I can’t really say much about it. It is more limited in devices per gateway I think.
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Thank you very much for finding the time to answer, much appreciated.

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If you want the zigbee2mqtt version the answers are all much the same. Big difference is zigbee2mqtt is an open source project rather than a commercial one and the hardware is much cheaper, just being a very cheap USB sniffer that you flash with the supplied firmware, a five minute job that’s much easier than it sounds.

Probably isn’t a ‘best’ solution, just which one you feel more comfortable with.

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Too many choices :slight_smile:

I think I’m just going to need to play, I have a virtual server setup and will install later today.

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