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I love my Lutron Caseta. Falls back to regular light switches if wifi is out, plus I didn’t have to change any light bulbs! Never had any problems with them. These “smart” devices should always fail back to dumb mode. If there’s ever a situation where the dumb version is better, they’re doing it wrong.



> If there’s ever a situation where the dumb version is better, they’re doing it wrong.

Not sure what this means, but personally I dramatically prefer traditional "dumb" wired light switches that flip up or down to interrupt a physical circuit vs. Caseta wireless doodads with their little blinking LEDs, microswitches, and inability for "three way" switches to properly respect the primary dimmer slider's physical position.

Our contractor put in Caseta and it made me very happy to replace them with ordinary light switches. It makes me sad how much marketing and sales effort is going into pushing people into a brittle and overcomplicated computerized system trying to "fix" something that isn't broken.


I have Athom mini relays with my physical switches. They work independent of Home Assistant, and leave the physical light switch in place.

It's on my bucket list to try and find a way to cram a full shim of an Australian Clipsal style light switch with a no neutral wifi and relay module so you can do this by just replacing the switch plates (as it is it's my way or going with capacitive touch).


It depends on your setup.

My last apartment had fancy light fixtures with esoteric bulbs and old wiring. Caseta was the right choice there.

My new apartment has a kitchenette with proprietary LED lights, so I've migrated my Caseta system there. However, the living room and the bedroom don't have any built-in lighting at all - just some lightswitches hardwired to control certain outlets. I've circumvented the switches and replaced them with a Hue Wall Switch Module: a little transmitter that takes the analog circuit switch and converts it to a digital Zigbee event. This allows me to put lamps with Zigbee bulbs wherever I like and still control them with the built-in wall switch.

I know Zigbee bulbs can end up turning themselves on after a power outage, and I'm sure that can be annoying. However, there are some scenarios (like mine) where permitting the digital rough edges ultimately gives you a better solution than relying on whatever arbitrary decisions the electrician made.




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