A glaring omission in the Lutron Caseta family: indoor on/off switch

💬 Lounge
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In my quest to de-zwave my system, I’ve drunk the Lutron Caseta kool-aid and it is delicious. So far I’ve replaced a dozen wall switches with many more to go. Which leads to something else that needs replacing: all my plug-in z-wave switches. The only problem is that Lutron doesn’t have a normal plug-in indoor switch in their product line. I see 3 possibilities:

  1. The plug-in dimmer. I have one of these so far and I’ve put it into non-dimmer mode. But Lutron says not to plug any non-lighting loads into it. I’m wondering if this is true if the dimmer is in non-dim mode. Has anyone tried fans/other devices? I prefer not to blow stuff up.

  2. The outdoor plug. At $80 a piece, they aren’t cheap but they are rated to power non-light devices.

  3. Make my own by putting the on/off switch in a box and mounting an outlet on one side with a cord on the other side. Switches can be had for ~$40 on eBay. But this would be bulky and ugly.

I’m wondering how others have approached this very first world problem. I need about 12 switches which all power things other than lights.

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Lutron Radio Ra 2....

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For certain things you could do zigbee....

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This. If you can find the centralight (Iris) 3210-L plugs...you will be golden. These are very good zigbee switches and have great signal strength and make some of the best zigbee repeaters. They also have a built in zwave repeater that's joined separately...just don't use it! I've done as you and keep eliminating as much zwave as possible. I'm down to about 36 zwave items. Everything else is zigbee/lutron.

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Yeah I do have a bunch of Sylvania and SmartThings Zigbee switches (maybe these aren’t as good as Iris) but they are flaky sometimes. Just yesterday I had to rejoin two of them when they weren’t responding. I’ve been doing a lot of 30 second shutdowns lately with all my z-wave redoing which is probably wreaking havoc on the Zigbee mesh. Maybe I just need to work on Lutron wall switches for now and see if things settle down and start working better.