zlacker

Of course you can have your cake and eat it too. If you were to throw away the Raspberry Pi in my house that runs home assistant, all of the switches on the wall would continue to work. This is possible by switching in smart switches instead of smart bulbs. For RGB bulb controls, Zigbee pairing can make the operation of the remote controls independent of the hub to some degree, though I'm not 100% confident that those will function properly without the hub since then there's no coordinator (right?)

>>jchw+(OP)
That's my plan for the house. The internet can go down and every extra controller can fry and the basic switches should still work exactly as designed. I'm going for zwave, but the same idea - smart switches with normal bulbs. Nothing talks to wifi.

>>jchw+(OP)
Thank you. I am not sure why so many people have this impression that if you install smart home stuff you can't have switches that Just Work. My garage door has a smart opener and also a physical switch inside the garage and a key fob remote in the kitchen drawer, they all work just fine. If the Wifi is down you can just use an old fashioned analog solution. Progressive enhancement is not that hard, you just need to do five minutes of research and pay ten extra dollars to be sure you are getting products that have physical fallback.

>>jchw+(OP)
Yeah I've done meross homekit switches for all of our light switches. There's one that needed a reset (via the button on the outside, easy as cake). I didn't notice for weeks because it works like a switch when you tap it. Switches are the best place to add smarts and they gracefully degrade just fine. This midwit fix involving remote controls to turn on lights STINKS. Hell, our bedroom fan has that just because it's a 2 wire fan and I hate it.

>>jchw+(OP)
We started with smart bulbs, but once we bought a house, we've been replacing them with Lutron Casita switches and adapters.

>>jchw+(OP)
This was a basic principle I decided on when thinking about smart switches etc. Basically they must be dumb switches first and only if HA is working are they smart. The most promising ones I find were from Shelly. They fit into normal light switches (or in the UK you probably have to put them at ceiling roses).

Then I decided I didn't really want to put electronics in my wall at all and did something more useful with my time instead.