Scenario:
I want to use a motion sensor in a bathroom to trigger the lights to come on upon entry, off upon exit. I also want different ‘scene’ settings for day and night (pretty common) and I have a variety of light types/sources in the room. Finally, I want to have available wall switches in the room to override the motion detection and scenes in the event that’s necessary and/or to make the house more friendly for people who just want to use switches.
Questions: (see diagram)
What type of wall switch would I use in the scenario above, a smart switch or a dumb switch? I assume a smart (zigbee) switch would be necessary in order to communicate back to the zigbee bridge, the way the motion sensor does. Then all the automation between the devices could be managed in HA, correct? I don’t see any way the system could communicate with a dumb switch, but maybe I’m missing something.
If I have a mix of different lights in the room (RGBW tape light, smart bulbs, dumb bulbs), same question. Can I control a combination of different light types using the motion sensor?
Examples:
A. motion sensor triggers a smart switch connected to a dumb bulb (on/off/dimming)
B. motion sensor triggers a smart bulb directly (on/off/color/intensity)
C. motion sensor triggers a smart RGBW tape light driver (on/off/color/intensity)
Finally - generally - how would the system be setup and behave in order to have the occupancy detection triggers work and also have available switched overrides?
There is a lot to unpack here but i’ll start with some fundamentals to be aware of.
Smart bulbs can be great but only if what they are plugged into is switched on. For that reason i think most people might recommend to use smart bulbs sparingly in something like a lamp where you can be more certain it will remain “on” & therefore controllable when you most want it.
Regular dumb light switches can be made smart but installing something like a Sonoff Mini or a Shelly relay in behind the switch. You still retain the manual control as well as now having a smart light. The is often more cost effective if you are able & allowed to do that electrical work yourself.
Or do as I did & replace all my physical light switches with smart switches with smarts (wifi in my case but zigbee is a good choice too) built right in. I can still manually control them too.
Once all your devices are found in HA then your imagination is your limit regarding ways to control them.
Room motion or presence is often a tricky one to resolve. Getting the timings right for when to turn off can take a bit of trial & error to get right. I started out with 2 separate zigbee PIR motion sensors in my bathroom to increase the likelihood of one of them detecting motion. That worked quite well but didn’t allow for detecting motion through a glass shower door. As i said it can be tricky to work our the correct timing for “turn off when no motion detected”. I have since decommissioned those specific zigbee sensors & installed just one PIR/mmWave sensor. These are much more sensitive & can work through glass. Both these methods have their pros & cons though. For example, The zigbee sensors were small & battery powered while the wifi based mmwave sensor is bigger & requires access to usb power.
All the other things you mentioned will be doable once you have reliably connect smart devices. Also, make sure any smart devices you buy can be locally controlled. Stay away from cloud only based devices.
Nick thank you so much for the clear and concise reply. Super helpful.
Based on your comments it seems the right/best solution is to stick with smart switches all around. This leads to a couple specific follow-up questions:
PROTOCOLS: My goal was to limit the number of protocols across the home; my setup thus far was to include RA3 and Zigbee. I had earlier considered zwave for all the reasons people do, but was simply hesitant to involve a third protocol. Will adding a third protocol (zwave, for example) to the ecosystem dramatically increase the complexity inside HA? Or, do those ‘layers’ tend to disappear inside HA automations?
SMART SWITCHES: For my original bathroom scenario, does it matter what protocol the smart switch follows? Just for example, if the lights are on a HUE bridge, will a Lutron RA3 or Zwave switch work just as well as a zigbee, chiefly because the automation will take place inside HA? Or, is it ‘smarter’ to stick with same-protocol devices within rooms or ‘zones’ such as this?
You mentioned a combo PIR/mmWave motion sensor. I’m curious which one, and how it has worked for you? If a device is dual-protocol, it is always communicating on both? Or, do you pick/choose which to use?
One of the key benefits of HA is that, as the central hub for your smart home, you are by design not locked into one protocol or vendor. As long has you have the appropriate hardware to support the protocol then essentially it should work. You’ll then be able to design your automations to interact with any & all your devices, regardless of the underlying protocol used.
However, like everything tech related you experiences could be very different to the next persons. There are always a bunch of things to be aware of when considering things like a protocol choice.
Hue is just one zigbee based product & i can’t say if there are any issues (or even if it’s possible) to pair non-hue based zigbee devices to your hue hub.
I chose zigbee because of the wide range of options for devices & the more affordable costs. But because zigbee has less governance around it compared to zwave you’ll find it more likely to find a specific zigbee device that might not be compatible with your zigbee coordinator (hue hub in your case). I have been using the Deconz integration with a Conbee2 USB stick for years without any major issues but still i need to be careful about what zibgee devices i buy. Thankfully there is info out there (like this) that helps you work that out.
With most zigbee coordinators, even though the network it creates is mesh by design, there will likely still be a limit to the overall number of devices that coordinator can support before start running into issues. I don’t know what the official limit is for my conbee2 stick but it’s more-or-less happily supporting 65 zibgee devices around my home.
In case you didn’t know, zigbee, bluetooth & wifi all share the 2.4ghz radio spectrum, so be aware thats another potential complication to be aware of as you design & build your smart home. Hence one of the main advantages of zwave since it’s very different.
Dont forget about Matter either. It’s a good idea if are you not too far down this rabbit hole to consider hardware that does or can be upgraded to support this in the future. It’s going to be a while yet before it’s mainstream enough to be the easy go-to solution for us nerds but keep it in the back of your mind when buying stuff.
For the pir/mmwave device choice, again there are a growing number of vendors out there. The first one i bought was from the youtuber everything smart home. He started a business to design & sell his own product. Check them out here. But more recently i have bought some of these from a different vendor. Both of these brands work great. But like i said before they are not battery powered.
