I have been slowly replacing my light switches with these awesome dimmer switches:

https://eu.aqara.com/products/aqara-dimmer-switch-h2-eu

I really like them as they work fine on their own if the Zigbee network is down (for example if I have broken my Home Assistant server), and allow full control via Zigbee. So I can have things like lights which come on so my partner doesn’t come home to a dark house, and set them to go on and off when we are on vacation.

I’m doing it slowly since they are kind of expensive, and also since every time I do any IoT home improvement project it goes wildly wrong.

Anyway, this is yesterday and today’s surprise… the insets for this switch and the outlet next to it are tilted. Whoever installed the electrical stuff just sort of jammed it into place to level it out.

I feel a bit lame for just jamming in the new stuff too, but there is no way that I am going to re-drill the holes and redo everything.

  • shane@feddit.nlOP
    2·
    22 hours ago

    Yes, all the wires were black when I opened the panel up. 🙈

    Other light switches in my house had no neutral wire, which is surprising to me since our house is not very old. 😥 This one had three wires, so presumably with a neutral… probably because it is right next to a power outlet, unlike the other switches I replaced so far, which let whatever hack the lazy person who wired this up easily add ground.

    I labelled each wire what I thought it should be, based on where they were inserted into the old switch. The old light switch had no markings on it to indicate what each hole was for, but one was red, so almost certainly the live wire. One of the other two was the return wire and the other the neutral.

    I ended up just guessing, which powered up the new Zigbee switch but didn’t actually light up the lamp. Swapping those two did the job and now it’s perfect in every way, although I’m waiting for some wall filler to dry so the ugly gap at the top can be eliminated…