Sonoff

[RizzoTheRat]

I've been looking at options to automate some lights in the house, and the Sonoff kit seems like a great idea, the ZB mini can sit behind the light fitting allowing control from the existing switch as well as from an app or Alexa, and presumably allow the ability to give more complex commands like turn the extractor fan on if the room moisture level is above a certain value.

Anyone using them and found any major pitfalls?

Are there better equivalents to do the same job? The Trust ACM-2300-HC seems to be a similar idea but way more expensive and not clear how it communicates.

I assume with Zigbee I just need one hub somewhere and the switches act as a mesh network?

[ARHarh]

Been using sonoff stuff for years, not tried the ZB thing but I have 15 basics some of which have been running for 3.5 years without issue, I have 5 s26 plugs and one mini. Mine have all been flashed with Tasmota and run via Home Assistant so not sure about their own software, although I did use it for a few months when I first got the basics and it worked fine. By far the most economical way of creating smart kit. Shelly also do some good stuff and may be worth a look.

[RizzoTheRat]

Yeah, I was looking at the Shelly stuff too, but theirs is all wifi only. A lot of people seems to suggest it makes sense to go Zigbee or Z-wave rather than wifi these days rather than congest your wifi.

Looks like Xaomi also do similar stuff.

What's the advantage of Tasmota rather than the original software? Presumably for Home Assistant you run a server on a Pi or something? Not really looked in to that yet.

Presumably the point with Zigbee is you can use multiple brands of kit and still control them from the one hub, so aren't tied to one brand of software either?

[ARHarh]

WiFi stuff can be an issue, but I find it has far more to do with your DHCP server than the WiFi. Most ISP supplied routers really begin to fall over when they have about 30 devices connected. A good router will cope, or run your own DHCP server on a Raspberry pi or something. When i started out zigbee was not so prolific and I really didn't want my house full of expensive hubs, I was already running Pihole on a raspberry and it was easy to implement DHCP on that. Right now I have 81 things connected to my network of which 72 are WiFi. That being said If I was starting out now I would be using zigbee, with an eye on the new meta system they keep talking about.