(This topic is asking the same thing as Wall light switch : cross operation, but that topic is rather old, so I’m hoping there may be some new ideas.)
I am just about to embark on automating my home. To begin, I would like to “correct” some odd switch placement. I have a hallway with two lights, and two switches, each switch controlling one of the lights. Unfortunately, each switch controls the wrong light.
My hope was to install two switches, and the use the controller to simply swap the lights controlled by the switches. Unfortunately, it seems all switches first toggle the state of the attached load, and then notify (or are polled by) the software. I want a switch that first notifies the software and lets the controller decide what to do.
Is such a thing easily achievable? I imagine it could be made to work using two in-wall relays and two switches, with nothing attached to the load terminals of the switches, but that gets expensive very quickly. Once this is in place I will be wanting to roll it out to my entire home, so buying both a relay and a switch to replace every light switch is not ideal.
If you want to do this with only one device per load, then I think you will probably have to go to a switch which supports double tap.
You aren’t going to be able to get away from the fact that the single tap usually activates the load that the device is attached to. That’s just how these devices are designed in order to operate even when the home automation system is down.
But you could certainly have a switch where a single tap controlled the light that it was directly attached to and a double tap controlled the other light. The problem with this is that it’s not intuitive for visitors, but if this is primarily for your own use, that should work fine.
If you are in the US, there are currently two different switch models that can do this: the Homeseer switch and the newest version of the GE zwave plus switch.
The Homeseer goes even further and supports both double tap and triple tap on both the top and bottom of the switch. So single tap might turn on the load attached to the switch, double tap would turn on the other light, and triple tap might turn on both. You would have a lot of options.
Another option would be to use a smart bulb in each fixture and then have each switch bypass load control, leaving the bulbs always powered on. But again, that’s two devices: the bulb and the switch. Still, only one of them requires wiring and it might be less expensive than a micro relay plus a switch.
As a third alternative, There are some in wall dual relays which might be able to do what you want so that pressing the switch only activated the endpoint which was not associated with the load, but I’m not sure it would be to code everywhere, and it would be pretty confusing for anybody else looking at it. I defer discussion of that particular option to electrical experts like @Navat604 and others.
This is what I would do. Get a dual smart micro relay module and a dual dumb switch.
Connect load 1 one the relay module to the local light and leave the load 2 of the micro relay unconnected.
Connect switch 1 to micro switch 1 and switch 2 to micro switch 2.
Switch 1 is for controlling the local light and switch 2 is for controlling the remote light with Smartthings.
This way, you will be able to control the local light with a physical switch.
Dumb dual switch
Smart micro relay.
There are many switches out there and above are just a sample of one. Also it’s important to have a look at your current wiring configuration as well.
This seems like a very good compromise. As you point out, visitors won’t know to double tap, but then the switches will just default to the current behaviour, which visitors have dealt with thus far.
Thank you for the options. I think this gives me a starting place.