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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

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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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[–] nottelling 5 points 3 months ago (1 children)

shelly relays will do exactly what you want. just wire them as disconnected switches. i do this to simulate 3-way switches, but it'll work just as well to swap circuit behavior.

you can use a homeassistant action if you’re already using HA, or you can have the shellys call each others web api when it senses the switch.

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

I've heard Shelly bandied about quite a lot in the HA circle but this is the first thing that's made me sit up and take notice. You're saying they're far more customisable than, say, your standard ZigBee light switch?

[–] nottelling 1 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (1 children)

Depends on the specific Zigbee switch, but generally yes.

The magic is in the fact that you can decouple the relay, and use the switch as a sensor that triggers things that may or may not be related to the physical switch position.

The other reason I like it better than a typical "smart switch" is that I can use the shellys with whatever switch I want, so I can have it match my dumb switches and use different colors.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago

Thanks, I'm going to have to put some research into this!