I’m planning to put HA on a pi, with a usb antenna
I can’t decide which bulbs to use, Philips hue looks great but it’s pricey and I’m pretty sure it’s got too much “phone home” crap. I don’t want anything to leave my network. If I can use Hue bulbs without the hub, or block the hub from phoning home I would consider it?
I found some Sengled bulbs that look fine, but I don’t know if they are any good.
Can someone recommend some decent bulbs? Colour ones preferably, but white is OK too.
Any other advice? Got a home server, so can host just about anything to get this working together.
I have a combination of Lidl and ikea bulbs. The Lidl have lasted a couple of years, and are a bit ropey, plus you can’t get them when you want them (in the UK at least).
The ikea bulbs have been better, so far, and you can get hold of them a lot easier.
Both are connnected via a sonoff usb dongle and zha.
I use the Hue Bulbs you can block all outside network traffic in your router and the hue bridge will continue to work. I have see that the bulbs will work without the hub too but I have not tried that.
Hey there, I’ve got the same Zigbee dongle in HA through Zigbee2mqtt and it runs flawlessly.
Zigbee by design is fully local and can’t phone home, and everything that uses Zigbee will be able to pair directly with your dongle without using the Hue hub. Check Zigbee2mqtt docs to ensure compatibility of the items you’re planning to buy, but almost all of them should work.
I’ve got Hue and Ikea bulbs along with other Zigbee switches working perfectly. If Hue is too pricey, check Ikea Tradfri or any other recommended by Zigbee2mqtt docs.
Thanks for the advice, I’ll look at the docs.
How’s your RAM usage for HA? The pi I have is only 2gb, already runs pihole but I can buy another/run HA on my server, but if I don’t need to, then I won’t.
I ran HA on a pi 3 and then upgraded to a NUC with a Celeron using 4gb of RAM mostly because I used Plex at that time and needed better transcoding.
You can try running HAOS supervised on your Pi. Running supervised will let you run addons within HA such as pihole, Zigbee2mqtt, Mosquitto, Node-RED and others. After that, you can verify if you actually need to upgrade your hardware. You’ll probably be fine with that amount of RAM.
When you switched from pi3 to NUC , did you notice any performance improvements? I’m asking because I run my setup on a rpi3 and it mostly works ok, but the latency is sometimes high, so I’m wondering if upgrading the host will improve things.
I didn’t, but because the pi already worked fine and didn’t have many addons running. I have since introduced tailscale, diyhue, frigate without a tpu, etc and the nuc has been rock solid (even with 4gb of RAM and a Celeron J3455).
I think it comes down to what addons you run and what type of storage you use (if you’re using an SD card on your pi, you might want to boot from an SSD instead). Also if your zigbee dongle is old like the Nortek one, you might see improvements in responsiveness when upgrading to a zigbee 3.0 stick.
I have a newer ZigBee 3.0 dongle and run a few add-ons, but nothing big - z2m, nodered, mosquito is all I use. I will upgrade anyway, but I’m not in a hurry, it works fine, apart from an occasional delay in switching, which might be network related.
I’ve switched from LIFX to IKEA bulbs, I’ve found them to be cheaper and more reliable.
Did the LIFX globes cause you problems? I’ve heard quite a few people talk about issues with them, but I seem to have no, or very few problems with them.
Five of them failed and I had to throw them out. I’ve still got some that are working fine but I’m not buying any more.
I’ve actually replaced most of them with Shelly 1L smart relays so I can control the lights regardless of the switch status. This way it doesn’t matter whether I use smart globes or not I can still turn the lights on/off from my Home Assistant dashboard.
Welcome to Home Assistant. If you are starting out it’s best to start small, pick a particular room or two you think would benefit from smart features and go from there.
I have tried a few of the IKEA bulbs and they have worked OK. For lighting however I much prefer to to use smart relays or smart switches. The problem with smart bulbs is they don’t play nicely with dumb switches, and they depend too much on a working HA instance.
If a smart bulb is turned off by a dumb light switch, it can’t be turned back on via Zigbee - because dumb switch cuts all power to the bulb including the Zigbee chip. Likewise, if you turn a smart bulb off via HA and then HA breaks, it’s going to be difficult to turn the smart bulb back on until HA is back up and running.
Smart relays and smart switches avoid both these problems. They still function normally as physical switches, and will function independently even when HA is down. The main downside is these require minor electrical wiring work to fit, so consult and electrician if you are comfortable with that.
My current favourites are the SONOFF ZBMINI smart relay and Samotech SM232 smart dimmer switch. The latter is one of the few UK style smart dimmer switches available (I am assuming you are in the UK as you linked to Amazon UK and mention bayonet fitting bulbs). I prefer to only use smart bulbs in lamps etc for secondary or accent lighting.
Another option for lamps is to use smart plugs, IKEA, SONOFF and Smarthings Uk smart plugs have all worked well for me.
I think long term using relays and switches is what I want to do, but I live in a rented house so I can’t go changing the electricals in the wall.
I’ll buy a few and practice wiring them up though.
fwiw the hue hub is reliable and has some nice features. it’s also not too chatty online and you can block it from the internet and everything still works great.
i use a zigbee dongle and a hue hub
You could migrate the hue hubs to the Zigbee USB. I managed to get some of the oldest to connect after a struggle. But it works like a charm.
yeah i have some bulbs through the hubs and some on the zigbee stick. for awhile actually had all of them on the zigbee stick but things were slowing down, so moved back. Been using HA for a long time now and IMO there’s no bad option from a setup perspective with hue.
