Lighting nightmare

[Runnerbean5]

I started off with smart bulbs but guess what? Everyone in my house kept switching the switches off and knocking the dimmers off the wall because of of the cover I have to put over the switch and attach the dimmer too. So I decided to buy smart switches but now it seems impossible to connect them.

The downstairs switch is a two gang two way switch and as far as I can see there’s not a smart equivalent switch.

The bedroom which is a single switch seems to have an intermediate switch with 2 red and 2 black wires going into L1 and L2 but there aren’t any other switches that operate that light and I can’t work out how to connect the smart switch with 4 wires. Putting the two black and two red together didn’t work

Any ideas.

 

[ericmark]

I used a smart relay to combine systems, but still faults, I will expand latter but will it help you?

 

[ericmark]

Sorry was about to go out when I saw your post, with electronic switches they use a different method, they have master and slaves, you can still have multi-switches, two gang and single gang but not seen the slaves sold on their own, the other make not needing a neutral is Lightwave, although never tried them.

The main problem is where there is no neutral you need a minimum bulb size, and a hub, I had 5 MiHome light switches not down to 2 when they malfunctioned.

So the way around the problem is it seems the smart relay, I have one, so Instructions here and here the advantage is it can work with the original switches, you can turn off on original switch and back on with voice control or app. Mine has stopped working with switches, then started working again, since I only have one hard to say how reliable, but I have used smart bulbs with the smart switch, the light switches were not in best position, so using a double channel relay 4 outers and the one inner are now independent, so centre bulb is dimming colour changing so get whole range of colours and brightness for night time use, but can switch on all if I want more light . The package is here so you can find them on internet, it uses zigbee, the only down side was I wanted to use a remote control as well, but could not get it to program in.

I found the phone app gave loads of options but pain having to find phone to turn on lights, but using google Nest Mini's allowed voice control, it does some times get it wrong, but hey google turn on landing lights normally works, although idea was not to wake anyone when going to bed, and saying hey google is clearly likely to wake people.

In the main I use smart bulbs, again once the Nest Mini is set up, no real problem, but without it finding phone to switch lights is a pain. The Energenie do a remote control which I used in mothers house in an old cordless phone holder so easy to find at bottom of stairs, son uses Alexa which also seems to work well.