I have a shared concrete garage with many T8 fluorescent tubes. The T8 light fixtures are hard-wired; there is no switch. Now that it is 2024, what are options to make these lights/fixtures smart (specifically, Zigbee 3.0-smart)?
It appears that in the past decade there were two Zigbee T8 bulbs on the market:
As of this writing it appears that the Philips EasySmart was discontinued many years ago, and remaining stock is pretty expensive. I thought that Osram SubstiTUBE was also discontinued, but in any event it’s hard to verify any stock online of it at all.
If one wants to have smart (Zigbee 3.0) garage lights for a good sized multifamily concrete garage, what are options? Again, no smart switches or dimmers. The bulbs, lamps, or fixtures need to be smart. Some kind of integrated motion detection would also be nice but not required.
Safety listings are model by model. Sonoff does have a couple of smart plugs and the MiniR4M which are ETL or TUV listed, but nothing that would match what you’re looking for that I know of. (The miniR4M only supports 10 A.)
Shelly does have some UL listed WiFi relays, but you would have to check to see that all the other specs match. It is possible to run these locally, using a custom edge driver, if that’s of interest.
Also, anything that uses matter over WiFi will be a local connection.
That SONOFF MINIR4M is “TUV certified”, but it’s not really clear what that means in this case. This is the first time that I have encountered TUV. It appears that TUV is a NRTL (see https://www.tuv.com/usa/en/ctuvus-certification.html) but it is even less common than ETL, which is less common than UL. Also cTUVus is the more specific listing that one would be looking for, but the documentation is sparse to the point that it’s not really clear what exactly was tested. If a company is going to go to the trouble of getting an NRTL listing, why not go with one that consumers and electricians have actually heard about?? (I.e., ETL)
I am looking closely at the Aqara T2. It is not UL listed, but it is ETL listed according to a picture of the underside of the product. ETL listing is perfectly acceptable if it’s true. However, I was not able to verify the listing in the ETL database. I reached out to ETL to see what exactly is going on.
I believe that cTUVus like ETL is testing to UL standards, so it is basically the same as being UL listed. Companies use ETL and TUV because UL is to slow at completing the listing process, and may be cheaper.
TUV appears to be a perfectly fine organization, as is the cTUVus certification.
Hwoever, the SONOFF MINIR4M just says “TUV” not “cTUVus” (or Canada). So it’s really not clear what exactly TUV certified this device for, if anything. As a result I think the SONOFF MINIR4M ought to be excluded.
