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Comment by hamandcheese | Hacker News Reader

The ONLY wireless lighting system I will ever use is Lutron Caseta light switches.

They are magic and don’t require a neutral cable, unlike just about every other smart dimmer, which means they can be swapped in place of literally any light switch in any home.

If the Lutron hub is unplugged, the switches continue to operate as normal light switches.

They also operate as normal light switches at all other times. So no need to teach every guest how to control the lights.

They are HomeKit compatible, so you only have to deal with Lutron’s trash app when pairing new switches with the hub.

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100%. I've been using Lutron Caseta switches & hub for over 5 years and have never once had a single issue -- no matter how minor. The dimmers work like normal even if the wifi is down, and they don't need internet in order to work with HomeKit. I've never once had a switch not work or fail to respond with HomeKit. I have friends with Z-Wave/Zigby/Phillips/etc and they are always talking about how they are finicking with Home Assistant or Smart Things, or how the lights all returned to full brightness after a power outage in the middle of the night.

I want to install my switches and have them work, always. If my wife even once complains, that's a total failure. If a guest can even tell that they are anything but normal dimmers, that's a failure. With my Caseta system, my wife has never complained -- only asked me to install more of them.

And h/t to HomeKit and Home.app. I've tried Google's version (Home) and it's absolute garbage in comparison.

Think it’s worth mentioning that the author is in the UK.

Unfortunately Lutron gear just isn’t compatible with our switches. Everything 240V rather than 110V, and to make things even more complicated our standard switch dimensions (and thus standard wall box dimensions) are different to both the US and EU. Meaning nothing physically fits either, unless you replaced every wall box with an imported wall box.

Lutrons stuff looks amazing, it just sucks that it’s completely not compatible with UK homes, or even UK culture. I think a lot of Brits would find Lutron’s designs very jarring.

What I'd really like to find is some variety of smart switch with a mode change between 'control the wall circuit' and 'leave the wall circuit always on and send commands over the network', so that the same switch hardware can be used everywhere but you can change the mode for specific circuits that have smart bulbs.

I have no idea how one would design this in an intuitive way, though.

Inovelli (Z-Wave) supports this - https://inovelli.com/

They have a competitor whose name I can't remember that does the same thing.

If you never program the switch, it behaves just like a regular switch. If you program the switch, you can specify if it will trigger the relay, or just send z-wave commands. There's even a physical override switch you can pull out to cut power in case you have it programmed in "soft" mode.

The "red" product line doesn't require a neutral, either.

Works great for smart bulbs as long as you can set the hub up to do the control.

If you have z-wave bulbs (harder to find than zigbee, due to licensing), you can set up the z-wave pairing so that the switch controls the bulbs directly, so theoretically no hub required.

From having just stumbled upon it, it looks like Insteon switches can behave similarly, and have the additional nice touch of syncing the indicator LEDs between multiple switches if you wire/configure them correctly.

ZWave switches and dimmers also continue to work fine without the hub.

I do enjoy Caseta's smooth dimming and "nice touch" switch controls however.

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