I have my porch lights on a GE smart switch and they cycle on/off depending on a variety of conditions. I should have a good zwave and zigbee mesh on the porch. I live in Canada and temperatures get well below zero.
Any suggestions for outside bulbs I could install, where I could change the color blue and still have my automations kill power to the bulbs on a daily basis?
I do this with my coach lights on the garage, I use either Sengled RGBW or OSRAM RGBW for those builds. I then have them setup in a scene, and I have a scene for each color, white, blue, red, green purple, orange.
I then use rule manager and just change the scene I want to run during the times I want it to show and then I change back to the normal white scene for everyday use. I have a rule for turning them on that is the rule I change the colors on and a rule to turn them off sunset to sunrise
Do they need the power to be constantly supplied to them to maintain a good zwave/zigbee connection or can you turn the power on/off to them at various times during the day?
In my case, they are wired for power when the house was built with a sunset/sunrise photo cell to turn them on and off. I removed that and hard wired the power so they are on all the time and let my rules turn them on and off as needed
I did something similar to our porch light with a motion sensor and I can change the color on that as well. Power comes from the wall switch in the house. I put a cover over the switch so you can't turn it on or off without removing that cover and I just leave it powered on all the time
When the smart switch turns off the bulbs will lose power. It's a bad idea to use bulbs that do act as zigbee repeaters. The Sengled mentioned above do not repeat so they can be turned off without disrupting the zigbee mesh. When the smart switch turns the bulbs on they will use default settings. For my Sengleds it's 'on' and last color, but you probably shouldn't depend on the 'default' and explicitly set the color and level through a rule triggered by the switch turning on.