I’ve got two 100ft strings of led lights in the backyard connected together. It works well as power outlets in my 1960’s house are limited and even moreso outside. Wasn’t possible prior to led’s and the reduced wattage.
There are cases though where I would like to have the first segment on and the second turned off. I was considering putting a switch in between the two joining plugs. Theory says it would work once the switch re-established itself with the hub which is also ok with my use case.
I’m afraid to put a zwave device in there since the hub doesn’t seem to do well with wired zwave devices that go offline. Is there such a thing as a powered zwave device that is not a repeater? Ie. Powered/plugged in but treated as a battery driven device? Would that be ok then since it would be powered off a lot?
I considered using a wemo device but had two concerns:
1/ it will throw errors as the integration tries to discover/polls devices which is minimum hourly from what I can tell.
2/ I’m not sure it will default as on when getting power. Think it defaults to off which would be a pain since I would want both strings on generally and just be able to turn the second segment off on command but always on when the first segment comes on.
When you say "string" of lights, do you mean like bulbs or are they LED stripes?
Are they connecteed directly to 110V/220V or are you using a transformer (12v/24V)?
It’s two strings of real bulbs. There is a bulb per foot. With the led bulbs in them they claim you can string 5 of them together but I’ve not gone to that extent.
110v with no transformer. I have them plugged into a zwave device now but want to insert another device at the segment join.
So I think the issue is really about the fact that the 2 strings are in series and not in parallel.
So when the first string is switched off the device controlling the second loses power.
Ideally each would have its own independent power supply.
I know that the behaviour when powering up can be configured on the Fibaro Z-Wave relays and possible others. IIRC it can be configured to On, Off or previous state.
Does the light string have a ground at the plug? Not too many smart switch out there with no ground prong.
How about run a wire from your plug to the place between your 2 string lights?
Yeah I can do that on the Eva’s as well but they will be a repeater which I don’t see able to turn off and I think I need to since the string is as you noted.
