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.
Install Enocean wireless, battery free switches. I’ve used them for many years, they work awsome. The switches can go anywhere you want (double side tape on any surface) or screw in as normal light switches. The act of pushing the button generates enough energy to send the RF signal to a receiver you install with the light and its powered from AC mains.
If you’re in North America, you can source Leviton wall switches. They’re UL-listed. They have ZigBee and Z-wave versions. They have plain switch as well as dimmer versions. Once you have radio control over the light fixtures via the switches, you can add battery powered radio buttons that look like light switches wherever you like and make them toggle the Levitons. This assumes Home Assistant availability. If you don’t have Home Assistant and you just want to solve this, Lutron has an equivalent solution with their own smart dimmers along with their own remote buttons.
A low-wiring way to do it would be to replace the bulbs with hue/similar bulbs, then just put a battery powered button in the location you want to have the controls. £10-ish for each button, plus however much the bulbs are.
Then just have the button set to toggle the lights on/off (you can also call different presets like dim etc by pressing and holding).
Then hass just directly sends the on/off commands to the bulbs.
+1 for Shelly as I have or any other drop in relay, all the wiring you’ll need to do is behind the switchplate, you can decouple the input switch from the relay output and have HA trigger either output based on some input conditions. My fav config is having two flips of the switch perform a different action
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.
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?
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.