With automations under my belt and the house knowing we when we came and went it was time to get some lights in on the action. I avoided smart bulbs as I was not allowed to impact normal people operation of the lights. I also avoided Wi-Fi devices as those tend to have a reliance on cloud services and Wi-Fi is not a control network, so reliability might falter at times. So the showdown was between Zigbee and Z-Wave. Both offered smart ‘normal’ light switches giving me the features I wanted and my wife normal operation. I had some concern about the reliability of Zigbee in my house as a lot of the devices use the 2.4Ghz band which is prone to interference (at least in my house) due to the massive number of other devices around us using that same band. I also found that Z-Wave was more standardized and and interoperability between brands was not a concern. After looking at the options, doing a lot of reading, and talking with friends I settled on Z-Wave for lighting control.

For the controller I chose the Aeon Labs Z-Stick based on form factor and the fact it was fully supported by Home Assistant. I followed the directions to install open-zwave on my Raspberry Pi, plugged in the controller and added the needed Z-wave items to the Home Assistant config. The only Z-wave device I had was a smart plug given to me by a friend to get me going. It successfully joined the Z-wave network first try and Home Assistant suddenly had a new switch and ten new sensors. While I played with the new data flowing in I started thinking about what light switch would be first.

My wife was curious why I wanted the first smart switch in the house to be the back door light. She thought it might be to have the light turn on automatically at night, but controlling the light wasn’t what I had in mind. The GE Smart Switch I purchased doesn’t support scenes but it does fire off an event on the Z-Wave network when double tapped. Home Assistant sees this event and I can use it to trigger an automation. I wanted to replace this switch because a quick double tap the top of the paddle could make the garage door open. Due to the way my garage door is set up, double tapping again also closes the door for me. That leaves double tapping the bottom of the switch open for future automations.

- id: GarageRemoteOpenBLDP
  alias: Stealthy Garage Remote
  trigger:
  - platform: event
    event_type: zwave.node_event
    event_data:
      entity_id: zwave.back_door_light_switch
      basic_level: 255
  action:
  - service: cover.open_cover
    entity_id: cover.garage_door

I did eventually add an automation to turn on the back door light when we return home after the sun had set. However, the stealthy garage door opener is by far the most used automation in the house. If it doesn’t work I hear about it right away. What is your family’s favorite automation?

Jacob