I have generally had success adding devices to my house, but at this point I have a situation that I am not exactly sure how to address. Basically, there is a room in the house that doesn’t have any ceiling lights and so I have added two lamps each with smart plugs attached. The room was originally wired in such a way that all the bottom outlets were tied to a switch and my goal is to remove that switch so that the outlets are all always on, and the lights can be controlled by just the smart outlets.
I would like to try to keep a “switch” in place of the existing switch so that guests can just use what looks like a normal switch to trigger the smart outlets to change. I don’t know of anything like this at the moment, but I was hoping that someone may have run into something like this, or may have some ideas that I haven’t thought of just yet. Any ideas are greatly appreciated!
If you want to keep the switch where it it is, you could use the switch pictured below. If your local electrical code permits, you would wire the load and line together at the switch to keep the power always on for the plugs. Then you would connect the load to the switch but not the line. The switch will send commands to Smartthings which you you can use to control the plugs.
Sorry, I misread your original question. My bad. @ErnieG has given you a much better answer than I did.
You will probably have to bring in an electrician to rewire the outlets in order to get the outlets “always on” again, but then the accessory switch that he mentioned can be used to send a message to the hub which then sends a message to the smart plugs.
@Navat604 or one of the other electricians in the community might be able to say more.
Just in case the old switch is connected with a single romex with just 2 wires. You will have to find the other end of that wire bundle at one of the outlet and connect the white wire to neutral and black to line to get the switch @ErnieG mentioned above.
Thanks for all the quick responses! I honestly hadn’t thought of just using a switch without the line, but that is essentially what I was looking for. Thanks for the advice and the tips!
Actually you are going to use The Line wire which is the power wire from the circuit breaker and the neutral wire from the same romex to the circuit breaker. You won’t be using the load which is the output of the switch and usually connect to the light bulb hot side.
