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Home Assistant is open source home automation that puts local control and privacy first. Powered by a worldwide community of tinkerers and DIY enthusiasts. Perfect to run on a Raspberry Pi or a local server. Available for free at home-assistant.io

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Light switch advice (self.homeassistant)

submitted 3 months ago by skullvalanche to c/homeassistant

18 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Just looking for some advice if the idea I have in mind is even feasible.

I have 2 light switches in my kitchen, one for some pendant lights, one for some overhead cannister lights.

I hate the placement of the switches, since the pendant lights which I prefer are far away from the actual doorways into the kitchen. Meanwhile the cannister lights are on the switches near the doors.

I'm looking to do some clever "hackery" to make it so the switches by the doors control the pendant lights, if possible, but I don't want to have to rewire things in the walls/ceilings.

Is there a good solution to this? I was looking at some Shelly switches, but I'm not sure those solve for the problem I wanna solve. I'm willing to swap out switches or wire in things near the lights, but trying to keep things simple as possible.

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[–] [email protected] 13 points 3 months ago (3 children)

You could replace them with z-wave switches. The switches by default would control the respective lights they're wired to, but you could use scenes to control the other switch. For example, 2x up on the canister light switch turns on the pendant light (and not the canister lights, unless you want that, too).

I have similar stuff programmed with Home Assistant using Node-Red, but the normal automation stuff would work, too.

Home Assistant/Node-Red sees that Scene 2 (or whatever) has been called for, and then does whatever you want.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 months ago (1 children)

My zwave stuff has always worked 100% of the time. My ZigBee stuff occasionally freaks out and my WiFi stuff (wled) on 2.4g is a cluster truck of peripherals and frequently bugs out... But not zwave. Not once, not ever. Its pricy but so worth it.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago

FYI setting my zigbee channel resolved all of my zigbee issues, all 3 networks run flawlessly in parallel for me: https://www.metageek.com/training/resources/zigbee-wifi-coexistence/

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago (1 children)

This, but I'd recommend zigbee over zwave. Zwave is kinda dead and not worth investing in, zigbee sensors and switches are much more available and cheaper. (I run both)

I do a similar setup to what you want, with inovelli switches. They're nice but a bit pricy, there are cheaper options available.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 3 months ago

Highly disagree that Z-Wave is dead. There are many companies, especially Zooz, coming out with new products all the time. Yes, ZigBee is far cheaper but I've had the worst reliability issues with ZigBee and moved everything to Z-Wave. Zero issues with connectivity or batteries dying too fast.

But that's the beauty and strength of HA. Openess and selection.

[–] greyfox 1 points 3 months ago

The switches don't have to control the lights they are wired to. I have Inovelli z-wave switches, and on these you can disable the relay. So the switch can still send out commands/scenes on the network but the relay is always on.

Then you would put in a relay unit in the electrical box of the lights or if you have enough room in with the switches. Then setup the switches to control their respective sets of lights.

Might even be a switch out there that lets you disconnect the relay from the buttons on the switch but still control the relay which would cut down on the device count.