If you use the SONOFF ZBMINI-L (Amazon.com) and bypass the switch so it’s always on, it would essentially act as a sensor for whenever somebody interacts with the switch. And since you’re bypassing it anyways, you may be able to use the ZBMINI (the one that requires a neutral wire) but you’d have to be careful not to hook it up backwards.
The device presents a switch entity in HA which toggles whenever the physical switch is toggled. You now have a wall switch that when toggled, doesn’t turn the power off to your lights, and causes a state change you can react to in HA to control your smart lights.
Not yet @datbilling , I have however recently acquired the Ubisys S1 and will investigate whether or not it will fulfill the requirements from my first post. I will let everyone here know after my testing is done.
I am not sure I understand exactly how you mean @higbyk , so please correct me if I misinterpret your suggested solution, but I would like to refer to my intial post (see the fourth requirement). I do not want the lights to be always powered in the sense that I can’t reset the smart switches if there is a configuration issue or my Home Assistant setup fails.
For me personally this is a very bad idea, because in case of any unplanned event that would mean you would have live lights and other powered devices that you can’t turn off in any other way than meddling with the fuse box.
A lot of people here have suggested bypassing the switch when wiring the light so I will once and for all explain what I want:
I want the smart switch to not toggle the physical relay when the light switch is pressed. Instead I just want it to send the event over Zigbee so that I can act on it. This means that if anything goes wrong I can still reset the smart switch and have it start toggling the physical relay again.
Please let me know if my explanation doesn’t make sense and I will try to clarify it further.
First of all, thank you and everyone who tries to help me find a solution. I really have come to appreciate this helpful community.
That being said, I’m sorry, but I’m not going to get into a lengthy discussion/argument regarding why I beliveve redundancy or planning for unforseen consequences is a good thing. If my HA setup crashes, there is a bug, hardware fail or any of a thousand unknown things that go wrong I do not want to be running around my house unscrewing and screwing in bulbs every time I want to turn my lights on or off.
Further, this is one of the requirements I have for my setup. It doesn’t mean it’s the best solution (although we could very well argue whether or not always-on devices that rely on a single software dependency to turn on or off is a good idea). I know you could potentially get around this requirement any number of ways.
This is something that might not currently be available in currently released products even though it seems quite a few people here and around the world are looking and asking for it. “Let me control the settings for the smart switch so I can decide when I want the relay to be enabled or not.” I don’t feel like it’s too much to ask, and this thread was started to investigate whether or not anyone knew of any devices that support this, not to find manual ways to create semi-smart homes.
I appreciate everyone that tries to help out, but if there is further need for exchange about bypassing switches with wiring please create a separate thread. If possible I would like to keep this thread related to the main subject so that others who have the same requirements can find it.
Again, I say this with all gratitude and respect for other peoples opinions.
As far as I’m aware, there is currently no zigbee switch that will allow for an optional decoupled/always-on mode.
I agree, having an optional decoupled mode with automatic failback to manual mode just makes sense. It’s a great solution to the problem of smart lights vs smart switches.
I, like you, avoided a hardwired option for the last year because I was concerned about the reliability of a DIY system. However, I’ve had no issues with HomeAssistant/Zigbee for the last 2 years, so I’ve compromised and gone for the solution I recommended to you. My Home Approval Factor has gone up significantly! When a better solution does come out, I’ll just reuse these on my “dumb” lights in the basement.
I’m confident that eventually a manufacturer will support it, but most likely we’ll have to wait for ESPHome to support the upcoming ESP32-H2 (which supports zigbee/thread). See this thread for updates on that.
Now that I’m in the same boat, I’d like to reactivate this thread to ask if anyone knows of any ZigBee relays that have decoupled mode by now? I need the exact same functionality as @mikaelhertzman, but haven’t been able to find anything either.
If you are looking for the relay part only, and not the full switch you could look at Unisys relay that offer this feature. It’s expensive but offer the best ZigBee experience possible.
I’ve tried it in one room as I’ve not moved already, and was able to activate the decoupled mode by using the ZHA Toolkit integration available in HACS.
With a bit of search and help of the Zigbe2Mqtt doc to get the right endpoint to switch, it’s not that hard.
It was responding very well and served as a great router node in the network.
But I had to remove it as none of my backbox were big enough to close with the S1 inside.
I realize this is a huge ask, but would you be able to give out some pointers on how you configured decoupled mode using ZHA and perhaps even how you wired the S1? (Screen captures, instructions, anything that would help the people in this thread.) I read the Ubisys manual like 20 times but I never got it to work with the “signal” cable (the white one on the left) without tripping my circuit breakers.
I feel like this is the closest we are going to get to a solution today. Might be that more suppliers go down the Ubisys route, but currently for european users this is probably it.
I could try to gather the informations I had during this test setup. But as I said, I removed it from my switch.
It was a test setup on a two way switch without neutral (I had to jump one from the plug below…)
Anyway, please be careful and don’t play with high voltage if you are not familiar with it, just for safety reasons. I think you could ask an electrician some help to figure one wiring out and then you could reproduce in other room
Or you could post photos of your wiring so we could try to figure out
I have some questions about your requirements - I’ve run into so many people looking for a decoupled solution that I’m reaching out to Sonoff to see if they can upgrade the firmware to support this.
I understand that you’d like to be able to turn the decoupled mode on/off programmatically, but on what conditions should this happen automatically as a failsafe? Should it start controlling the relay if the ZigBee controller becomes unavailable? ZigBee communicates relatively infrequently, so it may take up to a minute for the switch to even realize the controller is down.
Also what should happen in this case:
The controller becomes unavailable and the switch reverts to “coupled mode”
The physical switch is toggled, turning the power off to the light
The controller becomes available again
Clearly if the switch reverts back to “decoupled mode” without turning the relay back on, it’s effectively useless. But if it turns the relay back on when it switches to “decoupled mode” you now have lights turning on unexpectedly whenever the controller is briefly unavailable. And if it awaits a toggle (virtual or physical) before switching back to “decoupled mode” then you lose virtual control of the light while awaiting interaction with the switch.
What are your thoughts on this?
Personally I think the best solution is to create a ZigBee binding between the switch and the light and leave it always powered on, but still report the state of the switch in HomeAssistant. This would work just like the Ikea remotes for their lights - it wouldn’t depend on the controller continuing to function, but would communicate directly with the light.
However, this only works if the device is always powered - it’s not a failback to relay control as you require. So I’m curious what your use cases are and how your ideal setup would work.
Well, thank you for your efforts! For me, the use case is very simple. I want decoupled mode to be on all the time by default. In the rare case that I need to turn it off so that the switch cuts power to the connected device, I would manually enable that option. No automation of any kind is required.
The only scenario (that I can think of) where decoupled mode should be off is when the connected ZigBee device disappears completely from the network and needs to be repaired, rebooted, or reset. This is usually done by turning the power to the device on and off in a certain pattern (depending on the manufacturer).
However, this is such a rare occurrence that it’s absolutely no problem to manually disable decoupled mode and then re-enable it. This could be done via software, but I would also be fine with disassembling the switch to push a physical button, for example. It’s more of a safety feature that you rarely need, but WHEN you do, it’s essential. For example, in my setup, I would have to cut the power to all the lights, remove the entire switch (including the socket), run the wires into a regular switch, perform the reboot process, and then reinstall everything, which is quite a hassle. The reason for this is that I can’t reach the connected device because it is installed in a very high ceiling.
That’s great, I encourage you to try to get any supplier to make this happen. I have actually previously been in contact with Sonoff to try to make them add this feature for their Zigbee devices but so far no luck. Perhaps if more of us contact them they will add it!
Regarding my “requirements” I really don’t need any automatic fallback to default mode. If there was a switch press combination, like hold for 3 seconds or press 5 times, to change back to default mode that would help but is not required. In case of emergency I would probably use MQTT or some other way to reset the devices anyway.
+1 for binding. However, decoupling would be nice as well as you have more options to interact with the bulb / light. I am also Right now relying on Shellies in detached mode and would very much like to get rid of them
I know I’m late to the game guys but just a thought here… haven’t even looked to see if it exists yet but what if…
I’m assuming you want to not bypass the switch so you can cut power to the smart light/bulb/device, if there’s a dual relay device you could map the switch input to the first relay and then leave it bypassed but run the wiring through the second that can be activated from HA or wherever
Edit:
Something like this: Zooz 700 Series Z-Wave Plus Double Relay https://a.co/d/7yZzoSV
Yeah this is what I’ve done using a 2gang in wall relay for a single light and a 4gang for two. Also has advantage that the power to the bulb can be switched off when you want to change it. Better than hardwiring the bulb.
I’m looking for the same solution as OP, but haven’t found any yet.
A ’ plan B’ solution I have in mind (but not tested as I don;t have any zigbee relays yet) is as follows:
Normal zigbee relay works as intended (i.e. kills the power to the lights when light switch is pressed)
Event triggers a HA automation that (after a few seconds) switches the relay back to on with smart lights in the ‘off’ state)
I imagine this would accomplish the same as OP wants, with the only drawback that when the light switch is pressed, all the smart lights stop acting as zigbee routers for a few seconds, which may kill the zigbee network.
Am I missing somehting, or could this work? And can someone who has zigbee relays installed maybe test how this works in practice?
I have one zigbbe switch that has decoupled mode. It’s WS-EUK01. I bought it by accident from some local guy who obviously bought switch without knowing what to do with it.
Usually those switches are sold by aquara brand and cost over 30 €.
