What's the best Zigbee repeater, to get signal to a different part of the house? I used to use a smart bulb, but people kept turning it off at the switch or moving it.
The old SmartThings zigbee outlets are rock solid as well, and also have current monitoring. I used mine both as a repeater and to detect a jammed auger in my cat feeder.
An important part of my setup is that all the switches in my house still work, and won't actually cut power to the bulbs. There are decent options available to add a Zigbee (or wifi) dimmer/relay/remote behind an existing light switch, which is also great for controlling lights that aren't Zigbee and/or multiple devices simultaneously.
This has the added benefit that the stuff it's controlling doesn't have to be on the same circuit, and "rewiring" a light switch is done very quickly in software instead of physically rewiring.
> all the switches in my house still work, and won't actually cut power to the bulbs
It sounds like you really mean the switches don't work? Shouldn't they cut power to the bulbs?
A core part of my home automation is that it fails gracefully. All my switches work with or without any Internet or home assistant server. My electronic locks still have a keypad and physical key, etc. If all the brains went away today, the only impact would be living life the old way. Under no circumstances do I want to find myself in the dark because my server crashed or the Internet connection failed.
Yes, but only if the light it's controlling isn't zigbee. If the light itself is Zigbee I never want that device offline, because it's frustrating to have inconsistent state when controlling it through the various ways we're used to.
> A core part of my home automation is that it fails gracefully.
Same. Most of my light switches have a Zigbee relay (or Shelly) behind them controlling non-Zigbee lights, and I can flip the physical switch (which still works if/when LAN or Zigbee is down) or use remotes/voice/automation through HomeAssistant.
I do have a couple light switches that I've hard-wired to be always-on and the switch itself relies on HA to function, but that's only because they were hooked up to a single outlet and became much more useful as a "remote" rather than a hardwired 110v toggle.
The Hue wall switch dongle creates a "fake" switch, the bulb is powered 100% of the time, the on/off on the wall switch just tells the hub to tell the bulb to switch on/off.
You'll find that the failure mode is the opposite of what you're worried about. If you rip out your hub and flip your main fuse off/on you'll find yourself in the blinding light, not the dark. When the bulbs are powered on and can't reach the hub they default to 100%.
