BTW, Lutron Serena shades are sold in England and have an IFTTT channel, so you can get good indirect integration with SmartThings that way. Or if you have a harmony hub, it also integrates with Lutron Caseta. Not the lowest price solution, but a popular shade and well made.
I don’t know anything about this particular contractor, but this does a good job of showing the line.
You can find official suppliers on the Lutron site:
I have a feeling the upcoming deliveries of Echo in the UK will boost Smarthings sales. Its certainly the device that has causedme to make a recent purchase of starter kit and additional power outlet modules. Although Im not afraid of getting my hands dirty with technology and doing the odd bit of modification and tinkering to get things working, Smartthings just seemed the easiest to work out of the box with Amazon Echo.
Im about to start playing with a couple of different relays to see if they work with the smartthings and can be integrated in the way Id like - though these are Zwave, not the Zigbee that the ST power outlets run on.
I was a little dissaponted to find that the protocol for the sockets was zigbee, because I wasn’t intending on an awful lot of those. My house is quite wide, and the sockets I wished to control were some distance apart, leading to some time being needed finding the optimal placement for the hub (now residing on a table with the use of a homeplu network connection).
Had the outlets been Z-wave this would not have been that much of an issue, as with the number of fibaro dimmers I intend to install (if they work as I hope), the mesh would have been a bit more robust I think.
It was also a bit of a dissapointment to find them only for sale in currys/PCworld. Is there some sort of exclusivity deal being had? Its not usually the place I go to for bleeding edge technology, and the prices are somewhat steep for my liking.
A nice £25 integrated lighting relay from smartthings would be nice, given I’m looking to controll about 50 lighting circuits.
To the best of my knowledge, we do not have first-party switches on the roadmap for anywhere in the world… there are a lot of great companies that have been making quality switches for a long time.
In the UK, there are limited options for third-party Z-Wave or Zigbee switches (it’s not as DIY of a project in the UK as it is in the US), but people have reported success with the Aeon and Fibaro relays.
I think I will go with Zwave from now on, and the TKB ones look decent. I just got a zigbee one with teh starter kit, so ran with those for the few I needed, so as not to waste the one that came with the starter kit. Though now Im thinking of using them for Christmas lights and running routines with those instead of standard timers, so now I can see me needing a few more outlets.
The problem Ill have now is getting zwave from the hub to the outlets, as the outlets closest to the hub are now zigbee. Ill just have to play around and maybe daisy chain the zigbee outlets in one direction in the home and zwave in the other.
Thanks for the advice on the TKB outlets though, significantly cheaper than the ST ones, especially if Im now going to be looking for another 5 or so.
There are two version of the TKB outlets, so make sure you get the correct one for your needs. The cheaper one (TZ68E) does not show the power being used by the device, but they also do a slightly more expensive version (TZ88E) that does have power metering built in.
One other thing to note is that the TKB Outlets have a Blue LED Indicator light that seems to work in reverse to other outlets. i.e. - The light is on when the device is off and vice versa.
Apparently this can be changed, although I haven’t found out how to do this.
Thanks bennetm3, depending on the price difference Im not sure I’d require the power metering. Its likely that some of these outlets will only be used for stuff like Christmas lights or temporary installations, for which Im not really bothered about the consumption.
Though Im confused with the different versions of the TKB outlets. There are three on this site, and I assume that the one for £28 is just the same as the one at £35.95, but without power reporting. But then whats the difference between the one at £35 and the one at £35.95 - they both seem to state power reporting …
Depending on the number of outlets then, the saving on not bothering with power consumption reporting could be significant. Though knowing me, I’ll get the one with more functionality than I actually need, just because.
Interesting to note about the LED indicator, it would be useful to switch that around.
