Need Advise - Inovelli/Hue Setup

Lighting
1

Hello,

I’m doing a major renovation on my house, and in the process am going to do a complete lighting redesign (mostly) in my living room & kitchen area.

After a lot of reading here, and other research, my current plan is to use Inovelli Blue switches and Philips Hue bulbs. I have a C-8 Pro hub.

Now, looking at all the information, I’d love some advice.

First, what are the advantages and disadvantages of using the Hue Hub as part of the configuration? I’m not clear on whether the best config would be to go all-native with Hubitat or use the hub as part of it.

Would it be better to use Z-Wave?
My electrician will be doing all the wiring of switches, so they’ll be all set up, not yet paired to my hub, all at once. Anything I need to be aware of there?

Any other things I need to consider?

Thanks for the advice from your experience. I’m new to doing smart bulbs integrated into the hub.

-Vern

2

With Blues and Hue, the main advantage of NOT using the Hue bridge is that you can use zigbee direct-binding. Once a direct binding is set, it doesn’t require the hub to even be involved anymore, so then the switch and light very genuinely do perform just like a dumb setup (in terms of basic on/off & dimming anyway).

But to set up direct binding, that requires both ends [light(s) and switch] are paired to the same controller - since Inovelli cannot be paired to a Hue bridge, that means you’d need to pair the Hues to Hubitat instead.

The downside to pairing Hue to anything other than a Hue bridge is that you inevitably lose some Hue-only bells-&-whistles. For some folks heavy into Hue features, that’s a showstopper. For other folks, those things aren’t missed at all.

That all said, I’d think very carefully about combining smart lights AND smart bulbs for the majority of your lighting. Direct-binding or not, it’s a lot of moving parts and can get headachy fast if something goes off the rails.

I’m a fan of smart switches with dumb bulbs/fixtures for switched lighting, and smart bulbs in plug-in lighting. Well-placed remotes help with the plug-in lighting, but all of my lighting is on time-based, lux-based, and/or presence-based rails, so we very rarely ever touch ANY of our lighting controls.

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3

That is exactly what I do. All ceiling lights in my house that have a switch are using an in-wall Zwave dimmer switch and standard dimmable LEDs. All my table lamps and standing lamps use Zigbee bulbs. I rarely change anything manually due to automations, but I use a wall tablet if needed to change the Zigbee lamps.

I was thinking of sticking a Zigbee Scene Knob on each Zigbee bulb lamp to control it manually, but that is such a rare event I didn't bother.

Edit: I am brand agnostic, so my dimmer switches are a combination of probably six different brands of Zwave dimmers at this point. I've never bought any smart home devices based on the brand, just by protocol.

4

What are your goals for the lighting redesign and how do smart bulbs fit into this? Are you looking for changing of color temperature throughout the day? Do you plan to use colored scenes? Once the community has a better idea of your intended outcome, they will be able to provide a little bit better advice.

Personally, I converted all of my lighting to Hue attached to the Hue Bridge. I do this because I run a circadian lighting scheme during the day and colored scenes in the evening/overnight. The Hue Bridge “bells and whistles” as @hydro311 mentioned is important to me and my family. I also have self-contained Hue buttons/dimmers/dials and motion sensors that are not exposed to Hubitat’s rules. I then put Matter Switches than have Smart Bulb Mode on them (Inovelli White and Leviton 3rd Generation) and use Hubitat to bring it all together. I say all of this because it was intentional in my lighting design and the goals that I and my family had for our lights.

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5

We moved into our current home about three years ago, and although I removed most of the automation stuff from the previous house, I treated the new one as a clean slate. The new house had 23 6” can lights with dumb bulbs and trim rings that either needed to be replaced or painted. I replaced all 23 with Hue retrofit bulbs. I also replaced virtually every switch in the house (40+) with Inovelli Blues.

To say it was a tough nut to swallow would be a huge understatement, but I did a good amount of research before pulling the trigger and this was the only path that gave me what I wanted. I guess you could call it my prime directive, but to the largest extent possible I want everything in my house to work as expected even if the controller goes down. If there’s a switch on the wall that controls lights, it has to work 100% of the time. No ifs, ands or buts. Automations are a convenience, not a necessity.

Of course, any automation-capable dimmer switch along with dumb bulbs will satisfy that requirement, but I wanted to control color temperature and, in a few cases, the actual color of the bulbs as well. That meant using smart bulbs along with switches that could directly control the bulbs. Wifi bulbs were out of the question, as they’re a huge violator of the prime directive. Both zwave and zigbee can operate independently of a hub (once they’re configured), but zwave smart bulbs are almost non-existent. When it comes to zigbee, Hue has a reputation for being the most reliable and Inovelli demonstrated that their blue switches could directly control Hue lights, so it really was the only path that gave me what I wanted.

The pain of spending that much money has passed, and I don’t regret the decision. If I get hit by a bus tomorrow, every switch in my house will continue to work as expected. I’ve since added 9 additional Hue downlights to my garage and another 3 during a small bathroom remodel.

As someone else has mentioned, you cannot use the Hue hub because the switches and bulbs must be on the same zigbee network for direct association to be possible, and you can’t pair Inovelli Blues to a Hue hub, unfortunately.

However, I also have 12 Hue A19 bulbs, and I recently moved them from Hubitat to a Hue hub to take some of the load off HE’s zigbee network. Being table and floor lamps, they’re not a permanent part of the house and not controlled by wall switches (I have Hue remotes for those). If they stop working because I get hit by a bus and the system goes down, the bulbs can always be replaced with dumb bulbs without my wife having to call in an electrician or a home automation expert.

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6

Being pedantic, but even zigbee binding is not 100%… Only thing that is are hard wired switches to dumb bulbs.

But in practical terms, what you did is likely as good as it will get using protocol based control that can be done hubless (aka no Lutron).

I’m building a new house right now, and likely am going all Inovelli Blue even though I don’t have smart bulbs.

7

Exactly. For all intents and purposes, short of a device failure the setup should work as intended indefinitely.

My only real concern is that the electrical system in my house won’t collapse if I get hit by a bus and my wife has to deal with things on her own. I don’t like the idea that an entire house is controlled by a little black box plugged into a USB adapter somewhere (or a computer or raspberry pi, etc.).

Home automation is still way outside of the mainstream, and I suspect even most electricians would have a difficult time figuring things out.

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When I die I fully expect my wife to get an electrician to replace all switches with dumb ones anyway. :shrug: So that isn’t a huge concern of mine. But I do want mine to be as reliable as reasonably possible in the meantime.

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:100:

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Thanks for all the great input here.

Given how the main space I’m dealing with (an open concept kitchen/living area) my intent is to be able to provide ergonomic lighting throughout the space. Most of it will be canned (recessed) lighting. One of my guiding principles is that I do want switches on the wall that will be able to control/dim any lighting zone. Those zones will have the smart bulbs so that we can set up scenes/lighting warmth/brightness based on usage of the area.

So I’m going to go with the Inovelli Blue/Hue combo. I apreciate all the input on what hurdles I might be undertaking with that. I’ve actually ordered a “test” setup that I’m going to do in a room right away, so that I can validate what I”m doing.

Thanks again for all your help!

-Vern

11

Super smart thing to do.

I’m building a new house right now, and have 3 different lighting/switch/dimmer combos in service right now as I was putting them through real world scenarios.

So valuable, and proved to myself I was wrong on a few of my ideas/uses.

12

Did you consider Lutron RadioRA 3 with their Lumaris fixtures? That would be high on my list of possibilities for a new build - solid control system with low-end dimming that is actually low.

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I did, as I went through the RA3 training, etc. They are a bit expensive, but not prohibitively so.

My issue with Lumaris is the low lumen output. 800lm isn’t great for big rooms (like living room/great rooms) and makes you have to install way more of them to get the lm/sqft I wanted. They would be fine in other rooms, but then I would have different brand lights in different rooms which wasn’t my preference.

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What non-smart bulbs did you choose? Low end dimming is more important to me. I’ve not found any non-”smart” bulbs that do low-end well for a reasonable price.

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Haven’t finalized that yet.

HALO RL are the most common around here on custom builds, but those are also only 800-1000lm, so I likely won’t be going with those either - at least not in my great room.

For higher lumen uses I see Nora / IOLITE used a lot in custom builds here. NIO-4RNDC - Nora Lighting