Our apartment is nice and comfy, but when it comes to smarting it up with some HomeKit controllable fixtures, it has been a nightmare. The main culprit has always been the ancient electrical installation with no neutral wire. Fortunately, the market has evolved and things are much better now.
We’ve approached the subject a few years ago. No matter how you tried, it was pretty much impossible. All the switches and sockets have been designed to use the infamous neutral wire, which our installation is obviously missing. Those rare examples of devices not requiring the unfortunate cable have been built mainly for the American marked and therefore utilizing a rectangle shaped electrical box and won’t fit into our square or round ones.
I’ve dropped it altogether, maybe trying out some Ikea smart bulbs, but this kind of solution has it’s own flaws. When you shift the control of the lights to the light bulbs, you lose the function in-wall switches and you start arming up in on-on wall, battery powered remotes. A lot of them. You can also make use of an application, but then someone, sometime inadvertently will press that switch sending your devices into unresponsive state.
When you have to explain to other dwellers or your guests how to use something as basic and plain as light switches it means the solution is simply stupid. Since then, the market has developed significantly, and suddenly we have somewhat more wallet friendly options than just major renovation of the entire apartment because of the electrical cables.
Oh, my poor wife and wallet... 😂
Let The Testing Begin!
I’ve had a Z-Wave USB dongle from my previous, unsuccessful attempts - we are ditching it. Zigbee seems to be much more popular and has, at least I think so, much better support with Home Assistant.
After doing some research (mainly YouTube) I’ve first ordered a 1-gang in-wall light switch to find out if it’s really going to work with no neutral wire. My choice was a Chinese brand Moes switch that looks kind of modern and supposedly isn’t an utter shit in terms of quality.
The other option was to go with a bit more reputable (but still Chinese) brand - Aquara, but for the time it was simply about twice as expensive. Enough said, the switch installed in the place of the old, dumb switch has simply worked. Just connected two wires to it and... „Voila!“
Of course Moes would like you to install their spying application on your phone and plant an additional network connected device, a Zigbee gateway in your home, simultaneously making the solution Internet connection dependant. To solve that we’ve got an USB Zigbee dongle, configured it within the Home Assistant server and made it the gateway for all the wireless devices. My weapon of choice has been a one from Sonoff.
The Setup!
First of all, a minor tweak in Home Assistant docker config was required. You have to let the container know, where the Zigbee device is.
Then it was as simple as adding a new integration to your Home Assistant configuration - Zigbee Home Automation. The USB dongle has been automatically detected, easily configured and ready to accept devices.
The pairing process was very simple. I had to hold the switch button for 10 seconds, after which it was automatically discovered and configured by Home Assistant. The only thing I’ve done (but I didn’t have to) is to give the switch a meaningful name, so I don’t have to wonder which one I’m actually configuring.
The last thing to do was to actually make it useful and create dashboard in Home Assistant to play with and check what’s possible, but also to make it pass things through to the go-to solution, Apple’s HomeKit.
The Way Forward…
Well, it’s complicated. We first need to agree on what to do and expect with the major stakeholder - my dear Wife. She is very suspicious of all the IT things I’m doing to our home. I already have expressed my intentions of replacing ALL the switches, which she wasn’t fond of, but I also plan to get rid of all the „dumb” sockets and MAYBE the breakers, as it would be the easiest way to take on the power consumption monitoring…
As they say… Sky… Ekhm, the wallet is the limit…🙈
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