The Smart Switch to Nowhere

I feel like this is a scene from a sit com, but I have a light switch in my back hall that I could not figure out what it actually did.  I initially had always assumed it turned on and off the light on my back deck, but since I usually went on to my back deck from my master bedroom, I never really had a use for it.  It is in a dual gang outlet with the hallway lights. I had grown increasingly suspicious that it really didn’t work, or that it wasn’t wired correctly for a three way switch, but when I deiced to upgrade my hallway lights to smart switches, I decided to see what the other switch was connected to, once I had the box opened up.

Well, I opened the box, and found that the switch was connected to absolutely nothing, it was simply sitting in the box filling space. In fact, I wondered if my neighbor, who has the same floor plan only reversed, had a dual gang box in their hallway.  In fact they only have one switch, so I guess someone changed their mind in the initial wiring plan, after roughing in our electrical. This discovery did start to make me wonder, after years of not caring about the switch, what could be put in its place that would be useful. Since there is power to the box, I thought maybe I could put a smart switch in the box with no load attached, but program it to do something completely of my choosing.  I had lots of ideas of what would be handy, after all this is the door we use when leaving the house when we are driving somewhere, so various ideas went through my head. In fact, I had several ideas, and wondered how I could accommodate more than one function in space of one switch.  I looked for multi-function programmable switches, and no one seems to have develop anything specifically for this, but I was aware of a ceiling fan switch that had two main buttons, one for the light and one for the fan.  In addition, it had an up and down arrow for dimming and fan speed, which I wondered if I could also program for additional functions. The specific switch I found was the Treatlife Smart Ceiling Fan Control and Dimmer Light Switch.  I know it seems like I have been plugging Treatlife switches in my two blog posts, but really it is a coincidence.  If you find another brand out there, Gosund appears like they may have something similar, but it doesn’t have physical separate switches, instead it has sliders.  Now installing as stated before is pretty simple for Smart switches, basically just like a normal electrical switch, except you need a neutral wire, and the space it takes up in the box is much larger than a normal switch.  Once it is installed and the power turn back on you will add the switch in the Smart Life app (coincidently since I have other Gosund products it would also be in the Smart Life app) then it is available to use.  In addition to adding in the Smart Life app, once it has been added it should show up in either Alexa or Google Assistant almost instantly, which ever is your preferred platform. 

Now to the fun stuff, how do I make an otherwise useless switch do what I want.  My plan for the two buttons is to have them turn on or off several different lights.  The bottom button on the switch I wanted to be my, “I’m leaving home” command and the top button be my “I’m home” command.   Incidentally, when I named the Smart Switch in the Smart Life app I called it “Command and Control”, not just because it sounds cool, and I can remember which one it is, but also, so it wasn’t something close to any other switch name, so as to not confuse Alexa or the Google Assistant later, when trying to control other lights by name.   This switch will never be controlled by name by either assistant but will show in the assistant as part of its normal auto discovery process, and if you have a lot of smart home devices that you control by voice, it is best to pick a name that is totally different than anything else.  Other than setting up the automation, no one other than me needs to know its name. 

This by the way is a good rule of thumb for all your device, try to avoid calling any of your switches “Living Room Light” and another “Living Room Lamp” as this will invariably make it different for the assistant to discern which you mean.  I have “Living Room Light” and “Buffet Lamp” as an example.

Now getting the smart switch to do what I want can be accomplished two different ways.  If all the other smart switches, bulbs etc. that you wish to control are tied in to the Smart Life app then life is fairly straight forward. If they are not, then option B will be covered in a future post, which is likely your only choice, and involves IFTTT.

Use the Smart Life App (a.k.a. Option A)

First the concept of what we are doing here is essentially creating a scene, and then having the physical button on the switch initiate that scene.  Now one tick is that the smart switch button whether a single button or a multi button as in my example have two states, on and off, even though we are treating the button click like the same command, regardless of what the switch thinks its state is. One is the “On” state and the other is the “Off” state, so we are going to have to create two automation that initiate the scene. Let’s get started.

 

1. In the Smart Life app (it is the same for Android or iPhone), we see all of the switches we have added to our network. First, select the Smart icon in the tray 

 

2. Next, click the Automation option and then the + sign to create a new automation

3. Now, select the “When device status changes”.   

 

 

4. Then select the device, in this case a switch, from the list.  In our case we named it "Command and Control"

5. Then select the Light Function, remember this switch has both a light and fan button.

6. Next select the On function, we will be doing this same process again with the Off function as well.

7. Next Select the "Run this Device" option to add all the functions we wish to have the button execute when we click on it.

8. Select the light switch to be turned off

9. Select Switch1, from the list of variables available to the Smart Switch. Since the switch is dim-able you could set brightest level via the same process.

10. Then select OFF from the options, and then click SAVE

11. This will return you to the Create Smart main page, where you can either click PLUS (1) to add another switch action, and repeat steps 6-10, or click SAVE (2) if that is all you wish the Multi-Function switch do.

In my case I added my Living Room, Dining Room, Kitchen, and Hallway lights all to trigger their Switch to the Off position. You will notice you can give the scene a name, but I find the convoluted auto-generated name is fine, since we never intend to use this for a Google or Alexa command, and therefore this will not be confused with any of switch names.  After you have completed this and tested your results, you will notice it only works every other time, this is because every time you click the smart switch Light button it toggles between on and off, so to ensure the button does it every time, you will need to repeat the process for the Command and Control Light switch when set to the OFF position as well.  Then every time you click the light button regardless of the switch thinks it is trigger the same automaton.

Other things to consider

Now that you have completed these automation steps for the Command and Control light switch you can decide on what to do with the other switches.  For the fan switch I decided to have it trigger a "I'm Home" scene, basically the opposite of the bottom button, but I could have it do anything I wanted.  As you build out your smart switch inventory, you may want to still have the bottom switch turn everything off when you are leaving the house, but probably unless you live alone only have the basic lighting turn on to help you see your way in, be triggered by the upper switch.  You wouldn't want to turn the kids lights on at night when you are coming home when they are asleep in bed, but probably still want everything to turn off when you leave, especially if you have kids like mine who leave everything on.  

Once you have the two main/large buttons triggering your desired lights or devices, remember even the plus and minus buttons can be used to fire off two more scenes or sequences of events, actually they could be programmed for four scenes, but keeping that straight would be a challenge in our use case, I suggest two, let me explain.  There is a bit of a trick you need to think, since they are designed to be tied to either the light or the ceiling fan depending which button you had just pressed, to have them consistently perform the actions you program, you will need to program those twice, once for the + when the light was the last button previously pressed, and once for the + when the ceiling fan was the last button pressed. Once you do that, then those buttons can be treated like independent scene triggers.

If you are interested in the exact switch i used, you can check it out at Amazon by clicking the image below:

COVID-19 Smart Home Revamp

 

Replacing my first generation Smart Home technology

As we all start to come out of our homes and have socially distanced conversations with friends and neighbors who didn’t happen to be part of our weekly Zoom Happy Hours, and I hope everyone had at least one Zoom Happy Hour to keep your sanity, we have been discussing what exactly were we doing during this seemly 3-5 month stretch, depending on your local state or municipality’s guideline.  I guess I realized without really having a concerted plan to do this, that I revamped my entire “Smart Home” while I was sheltering in place.  

The impetus for me to start this, was that I had a previous generation of devices that were tied into the Wink ecosystem and since Wink seems to be circling down the drain, it was a good time to evaluate the state of the Smart Home industry and determine what is the best current product platform to go with.  As a background, I was an earlier adopter of smartphone tech, and I am not referring to some x10 devices from twenty years ago, which seem laughable by comparison to Smart Home technology today.  Yes, I had a lamp in my living room, plugged into a white box with an extendable metal antenna that I could turn on and off with a remote control approximately the size of a TV remote. That setup was laughably useless, and even I realized it after about a week of trying to convince myself otherwise. 

So fast forward to 2020, and the options seems to be endless on what you can do, and I was mainly focused on the lighting in my house as I had a Wink Hub and Relay to replace, and a desire to reduce the number of times I am the remote control.   We have an open concept kitchen, living, and dining room, and the lights for the dining room table are clear across the room.  It turns out my spot at the dinner table is closer than my spouses so I get the honor of turning on and off the other lights, to set the “dinner scene”  see how I worked the “scene” part in there, bet you know what is coming. My previously mentioned Wink Hub/Relay had worked great in conjunction with my first generation Alexa to turn the living room or dining room lights on and off, but once the combination of Wink starting to impose a monthly fee to continue to allow these remote functions to work and my Wink Relay needing to be manually rebooted every week or so, it seemed to be time to find an alternate solution.  Also, since Wink doesn’t seem to have anything under development in their product pipeline, the subscription seemed like paying to extend the life of a dying technology.

Image of former Wink Relay

Much to my pleasant surprise, the number of reasonably priced WiFi light switches, seems to have blossomed in the last year, and the prices have become so reasonable that even your walk in closet deserves a smart switch (I will go into my personal justification for that in the future/later on).  Plus, ever since the advent of Amazon Alexa and the Google Assistant, if your devices can be effectively tied into either of those ecosystems, the back end app that controls the lights is less of a concern, since I can tell you from experience, the majority of the time I use my voice to control the lights versus thinking I will pull out my phone, launch an app and then click a button on the screen. By that point, I can just walk over to the switch and it would have been faster.  So, point being if you buy products that are part of a couple different vendor systems and use different apps, other than setting them up in those apps, the experience with Alexa or Google Assistant is largely seamless. This includes being able to create scenes, which are groups of lights being turned on or off and potentially dimmed to a particular level, as part of the scene, which can be set up in either home assistant and it doesn’t matter if the lights/switches are from multiple manufacturers.  

Well, now it was off to determine what types of switches I wanted to install and I was generally looking for ones that also fit my somewhat predetermined price point, which is to say the least expensive as I can find, while still being of a quality that both feels good when actually using the switch, and not appearing to be likely to fail in the next six months.  After all, we might still been in quarantine, or going back in for another round, heaven forbid, in the next six months.  I have used Amazon as the primary purchase point for my home automation products, although sites like Wyze also came into play for certain point solutions.  Since we are focusing on lighting today, I will leave smart connected cameras, and for that matter weigh scales, piggybanks, etc. for another day.  In full disclosure, I live very close to one of the few Amazon stores, so I wasn’t concerned if I purchased a product I decided felt cheap as I could easily return the items to the Amazon store, even if I wasn’t entirely sure when it would open again.  I started focusing on a couple areas that I needed to address, one due to the previously mentioned Wink demise and the other to address a hallway with three way switches and dimmers which do not work well in a analog dimmer world.   Since my frequency of having to reboot the Wink Relay seemed to be down to about every four or five days, that seemed like the best place to start.  Also, my wife had been bitter about my original Wink Relay install as it had replaced regular dimmer switches that had previously be in its place, and she would constantly mention that being able to dim the lights in the dining room would be nice (Wink Relay did not support dimming). I found a set of Treatlife switches (quantity 4 per box) on Amazon which had dimming capability for about $69, which also had a $10 coupon available on Amazon, which requires just clicking a box below the price to attain, no idea why Amazon has this as opposed to just automatically putting it in the cart at $59, but I digress.  I noticed that as of this writing the coupon is $14, so the per switch cost is less than $15 and well within my threshold for purchase, even if I hadn’t entirely decided where to put the other two switches, but I knew I would find a place that seemed perfect to me. One item to note, is that many of these switches are from China, and most leverage an app called Smart Life to connect them to your smartphone and in turn this is the app that links to your Alexa or Google Assistant, to provide voice control.  I do not know the full legal relationship and agreement between these companies, but it is free, with no mention of ever costing anything, but the thought has crossed my mind, should the relationship change in the future. The Smart Life App is utilized by an enormous number of different manufacturers, including electrical switches, home appliances companies, security cameras, even irrigation systems.

Installing the switches was straight forward, it you feel relatively handy, or have ever replaced a light switch before, this is no different, other than you need to have a neutral wire (if you don’t call an electrician for options). It should be noted that the enclosure behind the switch is much larger than conventional switches.  If you have normal outlet boxes it won’t be an issue, but if you have had a remodel, or other work done on the electrical you may want to confirm before ordering.  One comment is with putting two smart switches in a dual gang box it can be tight even with full size boxes, once you start pushing the wire nuts etc. along with the switches back in the box, but still it is certainly achievable.  I am not going into the details of the exact install, they have a manual, and if you have ever swapped a switch before, you can figure it out, nothing else special.  Once you turn the power back on (make sure to turn the power off at the circuit breaker prior to any work, my one final comment on the install), it will start in pairing mode and can be added within the Smart Life App once you install that on your Android or iPhone.  The app walks you through the process and the key here is to give the device a name you can remember and makes sense.  This name will become the device name in Alexa and Google Assistant, so make sure you can distinguish it from any other devices. Calling them “LightSwitch1” or “LightSwitch2” not a great idea.

New Light Switches for Living and Dining Room

Once you have the switch or switches should you decide to do several at once, I did the living and dining room together since they were in the same dual gang box, the next step is to link your Amazon Alexa or Google Assistant to the Smart Life app.  Did I mention I have several of both assistants? In fact, 12 total devices I just counted to myself, not bragging, but based on the size of your house, you want to have one within normal conversation volume distance, so you can leverage all this automated goodness.  Back to connecting to your home assistant, Alexa calls these links “Skills” and you simply search for the Smart Life skill and enable it using your login you created when installing the Smart Life app. The routine is similar on the Google Assistant except Google refers to these as “Works with Google” and they become Linked services.  Both platforms will go out and Autodiscover the devices and add all new devices you have added to Smart Life.  As a matter of fact, when you add devices in the future it is amazing how quickly they show up in the home assistant apps once the new device is installed, almost instantly really. Once this is complete, viola, you can now turn on your lights with either assistant by just saying it by the name you gave the switch, in my case “Alexa, turn on the dining room lights”, or for my wife “Alexa, turn on the dining room lights at 50%”.  It really is that easy, but don’t just stop there, as I mentioned earlier my wife liked to have the lights in the living room off and dining room lights on at about 50% when eating dinner.  Now obviously you can ask your assistant to do each of these individually, or you can create a scene. What is a scene you ask?

Scenes, called routines on Alexa, as well as routines on Google Assistant, are really where the capabilities become exciting, or maybe intriguing if you are not a technology nut like me. Also, this is where the array of manufacturers that may be behind all your different switches, lights, cameras etc. becomes irrelevant. While I may go into great detail in a future posting on the level of complexity of features you can go into with routines, I will just touch on them here.  All the devices that you have linked to your digital assistant, either as a Skill or Works with Google are available to be built into a routine.   For instance, I have a “Dinner Time” routine in both of my assistants that will turn on the Dining Room lights at 50%, turn off the living room lights, as well as a side lamp, kitchen lights, stair light, and then turn on a Buffet Lamp, all with one command.  In addition, you can add items like play music, as well as a myriad of other items that the assistants are capable of doing, many of which would not make sense in this instance. These can also be helpful once your smart switch inventory grows for items like bedtime, turning all the lights off, or when you come home at night, lighting up hallways and other areas around the house, especially when carrying in armfuls of items after shopping.  This also brings me to one of the few times my technology gadgets and toys has garnered a thumbs up from my wife.  Since we are spending a lot more time around the house, and trying to avoid high touch areas, the ability to turn on and off lights without touching switches was recognized by my wife as a pretty handy feature. That made it all worthwhile.

In future blogs posts, I will cover various interesting Smart Home devices I have found and tricks to make them do interesting things beyond what may have been intended. I will also follow up on the justification for a smart switch for my closet.