My nightstand lights are connected to a surge protector plugged into a Zigbee smart plug plugged into a dumb wall outlet controlled by a single dumb wall switch.
I have the smart plug set to default=On, so the wall switch works fine, and I can also turn the lights off from my phone or via an automation. All good so far.
What I WANT is to be able to turn the lights ON without getting out of bed, and irrespective of the position of the switch.
I tried putting a second smart plug in the switch-controlled outlet and making an automation to toggle the surge protector’s smart plug when the switch’s empty smart plug powers off/on via the wall switch, but it looks like it’s not simple to detect a Zigbee device “disappearing”. I found some integrations that detect zigbee devices disappearing, but those seemed more for running health checks to detect and repair moved devices than for live detection.
Any suggestions?
Edit:
Looks like a relay behind the switch will be my best bet. Thank you all!
The second one that I attempted to use as a switch position detector, you mean? Because I think I’d still need the one in the un-switched outlet to turn the lights on and off.
A lot of relay boxes will both detect the switch position and toggle the power, so you should be able to get rid of all smart plugs that you were planning to use for this light.
The relay should have these connections:
Ah, so it would disconnect the physical switch from the circuit except as an IRL input for the HA relay entity ! That does sound perfect.