Interior Lights.... When to use smart bulbs/globes and when to use smart switches

 

I need to explain my house a little. It's, for California, an old house. It was designed by Wolfe & Wolfe, a father and son team of San Jose Architects, and built in an homage to Frank Lloyd Wright's Prairie Style in 1916. It's significant enough that it's in a book. Also, apparently, this is one of the most original of the houses of its kind left. Certainly the front half of the house is very original, with some updates done to the rear half over the decades but most recently about 20 years ago. 

What this means is that the rear of my house has a relatively modern wiring system, where as the front of my house has Knob & Tube, which is probably original to the house. It also means that wall switches are often in short supply. E.g. my Kitchen has 4 entrance doors, but it only had one light switch which was near the Dining Room to Kitchen doorway. This meant that when you walked in from any other of the four entrances, you would have to grope your way to the light switch... now some people like groping, but it's not high on my agenda!

The previous owner had put in some low energy bulbs (Globes to Australians), but they were often the ugly type and there was a lot of lights that could be dimmed and they were still incandescent, which certainly didn't help with reducing power bills.

I wanted to go LED.

At the time the only option was Philips Hue. There are many more options now and I have no view on the others at all as I have no experience. All I can talk about is Hue. What I can say is that it seems to have the most complete ecosystem out there for lighting. It also has some great motion sensors and interesting switches... it has even created a 3rd party integration capability called "Friends of Hue" (FoH).

Having said that, replacing all your lights with Philips Hue bulbs/globes is not the world's cheapest option and so you have to think about what you want to do, why and, if you have an old house, is it possible because of old wiring.

Initially I aimed at the kitchen because, as noted above, we only had one wall switch to turn on the overhead lights. This could have been achieved by just replacing all the bulbs/globes with normal white ones, and putting in a smart switch. However, as everyone knows, the Kitchen is the heart of a party and so I thought it'd be fun to be able to change the colour. Also, just changing the single switch for a smart switch did not resolve the issue with regard to only having a single wall switch.

In this case, Philip's Hue was perfect. And how cool would it be to go into a room and tell Siri to turn on the lights in the Kitchen? I also bought 2 Hue Tap Switches. One to go near the Kitchen/Dining Room door, which is opposite the Hall between the two main bedrooms and the family bathroom, and one to go between the entrance from the home office and the back door which leads onto the back porch (Which has been glassed in and now serves as the Laundry). Brilliant!

For those that don't know about these Tap Switches, they are a brilliant idea. They have no batteries and they are not connected to electricity. They generate a signal from the Kinetic energy of pushing the buttons and they have have 4 options.

Typically, I'd set:

1. Off
2. All the lights in a room as 100% on
3. All the lights in a room as 50% on
4. All the lights in a room as 25% on

What's not to like? 

Well, it was great for us who lived in the house, but those who did not live in the house had no idea on what to do with it. It was so foreign to them because it didn't look like a light switch. A superb exercise in usability.

The other thing that automating the ceiling lights in the kitchen has taught me is that walking into a room and telling Siri to turn on the lights is actually not so cool. At this early stage in the game, HomePod's were not around and so I either had to have my watch (Too slow to react) or my iPhone with me at all times, which was just inconvenient. Also, what do your visitors do? It is literally quicker to use a light switch and everyone knows how to use one.

This means that I have removed the Tap Switches, and repurposed them elsewhere.... yes, another blog post will cover that. I then bought RunLessWire's Friends of Hue Switch (RLW).

As you can see, it looks just like a normal switch. This is showing the four options again, but you can have just a single paddle if you wish and, generally, that's what I've done. The only issue I've discovered was once my Hue setup got completely screwed up and I had to reset the whole thing, and the switch identifies itself by holding down option 1 and option 4 at the same time....if you only have a single paddle, that is not possible. Fortunately I seldom throw things away and so I had the 4 paddle still available.

The great think about these switches is that Hue passes them through to HomeKit, which I subsequently found out is not true of everything from FoH, or if it does, it can be a bit weird.

In the Hue App, the UI is a bit better, I think.

However, generally I have moved towards KiSS (Keep it Simple Stupid), and now do all of my configuration in the Home app.... or at least try to. In this case, I haven't yet done that, but I show the Home app UI for comparison.

I also created an accessory group in HomeKit called Ceiling Lights.

Well, that's the ceiling taken care of.

What about the other lights in the room? The previous owner loved lights, and had put them everywhere. The most obvious was a set of bench lights. I had no need to enable them to change colour and, at the time, no-one did a light strip. I did want to control the brightness though. 

The Bench light is controlled by a smart switch. In my case, I used a Leviton Decora DH6HD-1BZ. This does require a neutral wire, which is why I can use it in the kitchen, as the wiring is newer in this section of the house.

As you can see, it looks like a standard paddle switch, and it has a bar on the right that enables you to increase/decrease brightness.

When I first got it, the reliability was not that great. However, there have been a few firmware updates over the last 3 years, and now I find these switches to be perfectly reliable. My only criticism is that if you have to do a reconfiguration.... the HK code is on the back of the switch. Not easy to find! Thankfully there is an App called HomePass that stores your HomeKit codes. I'd highly recommend it.

I have actually split my Kitchen up into 2 Rooms, "Kitchen Main" and "Kitchen Sink", both inside a HomeKit Zone called "Kitchen"... so I can still turn on all the lights in the kitchen if I want. The reason is that I wanted to just switch on a light over the kitchen sink and the switch I used is the Lutron Aurora.

This is a cool little battery powered switch that fits over your existing toggle switch and also acts as a dimmer. It is FoH compatible, but is not supported in HomeKit. To be honest, I've not found that to be a problem because any automations I do I can still affect the lights directly. This is a convenience factor nothing else. However, one criticism I'd have of FoH is that there is nowhere you can go to see what FoH accessories do work, or don't, with HomeKit. I assumed, because of RLW, that this would. I was sadly mistaken.

In the Garage, I have fluorescent lights, which take a much bigger draw and 2 of the lights are 3-way, which means they are controlled by 2 switches, one at the main garage entrance and one by the side door.

For the Garage switches, I used Leviton DH15S-1BZ and DD0SR-DLZ

Pretty much everything in the house follows the rules I have here, except the front of the house, where I can't use smart switches due to the original knob & tube still being present, which means no Neutral wire.

Next up will be Motion detection, some automation based around that... and the advantages of Presence detection rather than Motion detection.