I also find these remotes very easy and not problematic.
The rotary one and four button remote has had more issues.
This on/off has just worked since day 1, last week I changed battery and it just connected on its own and worked after the new battery was installed.
I use events and node red to listen for button presses
Thanks again @dbs @Hellis81 @FloatingBoater and @Rofo for the additional info.
And I am pleased to tell that in the end I succeeded in getting this IKEA E1743 switch to work in ZHA.
What I did was resetting the switch by:
I did this several times before without success, but I now think that I did forget step two (removing the existing entry) in these previous trials.
Anyhow, it is working perfectly now with the IKEA bulb, including the dimmer function, using the “ZHA IKEA Tradfri on/off switch” Blueprint.
The only thing that is different from the original “IKEA only” set-up is that the dimmer responds much slower, but I don’t mind that because this makes the setting more accurate.
Just to be clear: I did not have to do anything else than re-adding the switch to ZHA, and the switch indeed is still shown in ZHA with only those four “Diagnostic” entities.
In the mean time I also added some IKEA E1746 Tradfri Signal Repeaters as Routers and one Sonoff SNZB-03 PIR switch, and these are all working fine as well at the moment.
So I am happy for now with my Zigbee set-up 
However, there is one new question that comes up now:
The IKEA light bulb is mounted in a ceiling lamp that can also be switched on and off via a physical wall switch.
When the light is switched-off via the IKEA E1743 switch and I want to switch it on with the physical wall switch I have to toggle this switch twice. This is logic and fine.
However, when I do this the light goes on but this is not seen by HA: in the GUI the light is still shown as “off”.
I then can still switch the light off again with the E1743, but I would prefer that the light status would always be shown in HA.
With a Shelly 1 I do not have this problem.
Is this solvable somehow by changing some settings in HA?
If you go into the Configuration for the bulb in HA you should have an option “Start-up behavior” which can be set to “on”. That way turning on wall switch should always turn the bulb on, regardless of what its previous state was. I have found that when bulbs are powered on from the wall they show up quite quickly in HA. However, if you have a lot of bulbs (I have 14 IKEA GU10s in track lights) if they get switched off, you will lose a lot of your zigbee network and it will take a while for that network to rebuild once it is all turned on. Individual bulbs are much faster, in my experience.
-David
Yes thanks David, but that is not the issue.
I already have this setting set to “on”, and the light indeed goes on when I switch the wall switch on:
The issue however is that when the light is switched on via the physical wall switch (so not via the E1743), the status “light on” is not shown in the HA GUI:
It is not a big issue, but it would be nicer when the status in the HA GUI would be accurate in this case as well.
You shouldn’t switch off the power to a smart bulb.
It makes no sense to do so, you risk destroying the bulb and you get this out of sync behavior.
Use remotes to switch the light.
Hmm… OK, I agree that normally the remote should be used, but the wall switch is still there, and someone who doesn’t know about the smart features will use the wall switch.
Like I said: with Shelly devices this isn’t an issue.
Shouldn’t it be possible somehow for HA or ZHA to sense that the light is switched on by toggling the wall power switch?
At first, I thought you’d ended up with IKEA direct pairing, but on a second reading, the issue seems to be that the manual switch still exists, can be used to turn the bulb on, and if done, the bulb doesn’t report status to Zigbee / HASS.
The only solution to that is a connector block and blanking plate (remove the physical power switch), or as is common with Hue bulbs - get a cover plate with a mount for a RF remote which hides the “real” switch.
There’s several designs for 3D printers on Thingiverse / Printables, but it rather depends on the remote and which region you are in.
Hue specific example for reference:
Printables
[ This is why I use wired-in dimmers connected to the mains wiring and not “stupid” bulbs! ]
I’d go with @FloatingBoater’s approach and put a blanking plate over the existing switch and use a remote switch to control the bulbs. You could even stick the magnetic switch holder that comes with it, to the front of the blanking plate. This is what I intend to do.
That said, I’m in the same situation as you right now, and have a physical switch that can mean HA gets out of sync because you’re shutting off power to the device.
If you want a less permanent solution and need to stop people pressing the physical switch, perhaps go for something like this:-
A third way is to just rewire the switch so that the live is always connected to the load.
Thanks again for these additional insides and suggestions @FloatingBoater , @Rofo and @Hellis81
I will look into these and see which solution fits me best.
The good news is that, since it started working three days ago, the IKEA E1743 switch is working flawlessly.
The only strange thing is that initially the battery status for the E1743 was indicated as 21% but a short while later (without me changing anything) this changed to 100%, which it still is for now.
So this value jumping from 21% to 100% and even 255% in one of the earlier trials strongly suggests that there is an issue in the ZHA code related to the battery status.
Hopefully this will be looked into by the code owners.
Cheers, and thanks for all the help, Ed
Or there is an issue with the cheap electronics that can’t read and report a correct value to ZHA.
I don’t know for sure, but I doubt ZHA is responsible for the calculation to percent of the battery.
One of my two switches also reported a very low battery level before jumping up to what appears a more normal level for a new battery, and its been fine ever since.
Sorry for reviving this topic.
My E1743 is switching two of my xiaomy xigbee plugs. I don’t have any type of automation related to the switch or the plugs.
I tried removing them from ZHA, adding back, renaming, etc. Nothing helps.
As soon as I add the E1743 and click the on/off button, both of my plugs (already in ZHA) respond to the clicks.
That sounds like you’ve somehow created a zigbee group with the devices (not a home assistant group which is different).
Could you have done something as described here ?;
I am not using Z2M. And as for groups, I didn’t set up anything like that.
So if they’re not joined via an automation, or a zigbee group, then I would suggest looking in the log to see what gets listed when you click the button on the E1743. Look on either of the plugs device info pages, or the main logbook.
For example, you can see that the last event on this device was triggered by an automation:
That’s one of the problems. It shows nothing, except turn on/off. Same as I would press the button on the plug itself.
I’m not sure what the underlying problem is, but here are a few things to consider:
So, if you have a bunch of devices that are turning off with the wall switch, it may be that this bulb is using them to get to the network and that it takes a while because it loses all of its paths. The best bet in that case is to put a zigbee repeater or plug nearby so it can use that network path as well.
-David
In my case I don’t have anything bound to these devices.
The strangest this is that if I delete one of them (switch or plug) from the ZHA integration, the “link” is broken and the plug is not controlled by the switch anymore.
In this case I loose that specific hardware deleted from the integration, obviously.
Solved. It looks like it was related to a bug in the IKEA firmware. I’ve upgraded the switch with STD OTAU using an ubuntu machine, and the issues are gone.
