Shelly is proud of their devices being:
- No hub neeeded
- Not required to be online
- Compatible all major hubs if you do want to connect them.
I do not work for Shelly. I just really like how I don’t have to use an app for them and they’re compatible with seemingly everything. I’ve bought the devices and I can do what I want with them.
I had owned two of their smart plugs for a couple of years and they decided to stop responding to resetting and could talk to them. Shelly support sent out two new plugs for me and asked for the defective ones back so they could troubleshoot them. Great service.
Just seems that privacy-centric people should be using privacy focused devices.
They are headquartered in Germany so very unlikely they’ll go back on their offline compatibility anytime soon.
Just buy a Zigbee stick and you don’t have to change all your existing hardware.
Shelly works with Wi-Fi which I don’t prefer personally.
Sorry this might be a stupid question but if I buy a Zigbes stick do I need to use Home Assistant? I have my Hue lights added to HomeKit now but based on the articles I’ve read Hue will still lock out HomeKit from control unless I create an account - so whatever I can do to avoid that would be great.
I’m running Zigbee2MQTT in docker. You could also run HomeBridge docker along side that, eliminating the need for Home Assistant. I still use Home Assistant as my front end but Zigbee is running on a Pi and HomeBridge is on my unraid server. Regardless, look into HomeBridge. It is very powerful for exposing non-HomeKit devices to that platform. I also have multiple Shelly devices and absolutely love them. I just didn’t want to replace my 9 Hue devices needlessly. I’ve been very impressed with the speed of Zigbee2MQTT over the Hue bridge so far.
Thanks - I tested out some of the Home Assistant and HomeBridge options previously I was just trying to simplify. At this point I have 4 light bulbs from Hue (used to have way more but they all were broken in a cross country move) and the Hue play bars. The rest of the lights are Vocolinc which seem to be just as good, so I just might swap out the hue bulbs remaining and then figure out something for the play bars. Preaching to the choir here but I am so tired of this trend in tech. I have Therabody compression boots that used an app to locally control the boots with settings beyond what you could do on the physical base. About 5 months into owning those I open the app to be greeted by a need for an online account to use the app. Just one of the many examples but just why?
Yes I think you’ll need Home Assistant for that. You can add any Zigbee device to Homekit if it’s connected to Home Assistant; that’ll bypass the Hue account requirement.
Gotcha thanks - I just re-did the whole network rack and pulled the pi out, and got the hue hub running off of Poe and now Hue pulls this. I did call into support about this whole roadmap last week and told them to please pass along that if this moves forward I’ll be getting rid of Hue lighting. It’s probably not gonna make a difference but still good feedback to send in.
Are there any reputable relay brands that work with zigbee? I prefer relays, but I agree that wifi based relays are basically like installing low power wifi jammers in your house lol (OK, that’s an exaggeration, but it is an issue)
It certainly could be an issue, but I have 6 installed in my home and WiFi can still go over 200 Mbps. Maybe it could go higher, but I don’t need that.
For me at least, it’s not about speeds, but stability. Prior to installing relays, smart switches and whatnot in my house I could stream games from my PC to my phone/laptop flawlessly, but after installing them all it’s completely unplayable due to stutters and latency. Download speeds are more or less the same though
Ultimately whether it matters will depend on your use case, like most things
Reputable? Eh, depends on your definition.
A lot of people make use of Sonoff and Tuya-relabled Zigbee relays. If you’re able to control it at a wall switch (so not an actual relay) then your options greatly increase.
I have quite a few Shelly devices, mostly relays. I Like them very much but they are not ideal if your target is HomeKit. There are work-arounds out there but they do not specifically support Apple ecosystem.
There are also custom firmwares you can load on ESP8266s as well, but nothing beats a UL approved solution so you don’t burn your house down 🤪
I have 4 Shelly Plugs:
- Two for LED accents in the living room that turns on at sunset and off at midnight.
- Two for my 2 3D Printers so I can remotely turn them off if I see print failures.
I rent right now, but in the future I hope to buy and get a few of their light switch and a bunch of relays to turn regular outlets into smart plugs.
Do you know if klipper can control your Shelly plug? I have a kasa for that reason. All local control.
I never tried, but Im sure it does. I have tasmota on klipper (mainsal) right now, but found this on moonraker:
type:
The type of device. Can be either gpio, klipper_device, rf,
tplink_smartplug, tasmota, shelly, homeseer, homeassistant, loxonev1,
smartthings, mqtt or hue.
This parameter must be provided.
Shellys are amazing. We use the pucks everywhere for anything that’s not innately smart.
Some of our use cases:
- Kitchen cabinet lighting that syncs each strip with each other as well as the overhead lights. Or the cabinet lights can be turned on independently.
- Garage door opener, because MyQ sucks (it’s hooked up to a real physical garage opener button and triggers the button for us)
- Outlet power monitoring (mostly for fun)
- Can be put in light switch boxes in lieu of something like Kasa switches, but the physical switch won’t follow the light state any more. Similarly, smart wall outlets for power toggling
