Hi all, Thank you in advance for any help you can provide me.
I am looking to update all the light switches in my house to smart switches. I have a few questions that can hopefully lead me to the correct setup for me.
- I have seen some things talking about HUB needed and some that do not require HUB, What circumstances would make me want the HUB and the contrary?
- I have 1 light controlled by 3 switches, is there a good switch to control this? I have found limited 3 switch sets.
- Is there a good place buy switches in bulk? I currently have 14 primary switches, 3 secondary switches, 1 tertiary switch, and 15 single rocker switches. hoping to save a little money picking them up in bulk.
Thank you again in advance of your assistance.
1 You pretty much always want a hub. This is what runs the show and what protect the hardware. Anything without a hub is probably just using one in the cloud where your dependent on them keeping running, to many manufactures have closed things down and left people stranded over the years. If you can not control it completely locally it’s simply not yours your renting it from somebody else.
2 Pretty much any HA network allows local association so N number of switches/dimmer can act as one. Z-Wave Zigbee etc all support this basic function. Some random wifi fly by night special not so much. Plenty of kit can support existing N way setups if you just want on/dimm last level and off Zooz makes a lot of these.
3 Not realy and please check to see that it’s UL or whatever your local equivalent is.
- There’s martin jerry 3/4 way switches. If you need to save a bit, you can just install a single relay like sonoff mini.