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Are Inovelli switches a good fit for old house with no neutral wire? (beehaw.org)

submitted 4 months ago by chahk@beehaw.org to c/smarthomes@feddit.uk

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I'm considering Inovelli Blue 2-1 switches for a new (to me) house. I'm pretty sure the electrical wiring in that place predates the American Civil War, so no neutral wires, and no plans to rip out the walls to rectify that. Would I be able to use the light switches for basic on/off/dimmer functions and have them in Home Assistant via the SONOFF Zigbee 3.0 Plus-E dongle?

I have HA up and running in my current place, but have way too many cloud enabled hubs (TP-Link Kasa, IKEA Tradfre, Lutron Caseta, just to name a few) that I want to replace with a fully self-hosted solution. Already bought and configured the Sonoff ZigBee dongle in anticipation. The only other hitch is that the gangboxes may be too small to fit larger switches and I may need to hire an electrician to replace around 20 of them.

Also it seems that Inovelli Aux switches for the multi-way setups are sold out everywhere. From what I understand, those are simply dumb switches with some extra bells and whistles. What alternatives are there for those?

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[–] BigDaddyRAAB@lemm.ee 4 points 4 months ago (2 children)

I got these, the blues are zigbee, red is zwave. I also have no neutral and they work fine, though you might need an aeotec bypass if you lights flicker with no neutral https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B0BG329SH3?psc=1&ref=ppx_pop_mob_b_asin_title

[–] SaintWacko@midwest.social 1 points 4 months ago (2 children)

Geez, $70 for a single switch?

[–] BigDaddyRAAB@lemm.ee 1 points 4 months ago (1 children)

When I bought it, it was 40 bucks. They're also full of functionality like having a "smart" mode which doesn't kill power to the bulb on off (good for lights with color adjustment for day/night) and zigbee pairing (light switch connects directly to zigbee bulbs)

[–] SaintWacko@midwest.social 1 points 4 months ago

Well, that's not so bad. I'll have to keep an eye out for them at that price

[–] chahk@beehaw.org 1 points 4 months ago

I bought them at $50 each. They're sold out everywhere and sellers are cashing in. Inovelli can't make them fast enough. On their site everything's back-ordered until November.

[–] chahk@beehaw.org 1 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (1 children)

aeotec bypass

Interesting. It says that the bypass is installed at the light fixture. Does that mean if I have multiple in-ceiling recessed lights on a single switch I need a bypass for each one?

[–] BigDaddyRAAB@lemm.ee 2 points 4 months ago

If they're all on the same line you should only have to bypass one, but I'm no electrician I just hooked it up to a double light in my bathroom. The bypass was recommended in the inovelli document that came with the switch