I actively use Home Assistant as the backbone for all my home lighting. Alongside this, I work professionally with lighting systems, LED tape, and pixel-based installs, so reliability and predictable behaviour matter far more to me than flashy demos.
With kids, lights get left on constantly. Rather than fighting that behaviour, I’ve built automations that quietly clean up without anyone noticing.
I have a few daily automations that control the lighting, starting with the 9:00 everything off, this automation is run at 9 as everybody is usually out of the house by that point, it triggers the All Lights, a group containing all my lighting.
My favourite automation is the living room lighting situation, this ones a little more complex and uses a HPD (Human Presence Detector) and it linked up with Circadian lighting by claytonjn, I’m a big fan of this, alas, the automation runs between sunset and sunrise, if it detects a person it will turn the lights on, if it hasn’t seen someone in the room for 30 mins then it turns the lights off, as the lights are running on the Circadian integration they are automatically set to the perfect level and colour temperature.
you can see here the run order, I also have the TV linked into this.
All the lights in this room are controlled using Zigbee, I very much like ZigBee, I know the standard is a little loose but i do my research and have had a good experience so far!
The End Goal
Fully automated lighting
The end goal for my setup is fully automated lighting throughout the house. In reality, there are still a few rooms that don’t yet have smart lighting — mainly the bathroom and kitchen.
Living in a 1970s-built home makes this more challenging than it sounds. There’s a complete lack of neutral wires at the switches, a mix of dual light switches, and different fixture types in the same room. In the kitchen, for example, I’m dealing with one fluorescent tube and one standard ceiling-hung light, which makes drop-in smart solutions awkward.
I’ve experimented with a few Zigbee-controlled light switches, but dual-switch setups add another layer of complexity. Physically, I also need to deepen some of the back boxes to fit smart switches properly — something I haven’t prioritised yet, but it’s firmly on the list.
For the bathroom, I’m leaning towards using a dedicated smart controller rather than smart bulbs or switches. I’ve been very impressed with the build quality of some Zigbee LED controllers, and the current front-runner is the MiBoxer single-channel Zigbee controller. Although it’s designed for LED tape, my bathroom lighting runs from a 24 V LED panel, so it should integrate cleanly without compromising reliability, however nobody wants to turn on their bathroom light using a phone when your busting for a wee, and well the kids don’t have phones yet so maybe its HPD time?
This approach keeps the lighting local, predictable, and fully controllable from Home Assistant — without fighting the limitations of older wiring.
What broke and how I fixed it.
things always break, its not fun when the lights don’t turn on at 9:00 at night!
Wi-Fi congestion and delayed responses
Early on, I experimented with a lot of Wi-Fi–based lighting devices, specifically TP-Link Tapo lights. On paper they worked fine, but in practice things quickly became messy as the system grew.
What was happening:
- Delayed light responses
- Occasional missed commands
- Devices randomly becoming unavailable
What caused it:
- Too many always-on Wi-Fi devices
- ESP-based devices competing with general home network traffic
- Poor signal quality in certain rooms
How I fixed it:
- Reducing the number of Wi-Fi lighting devices wherever possible
- Moving room-based lighting over to Zigbee
- Keeping Wi-Fi mainly for controllers, not individual lights
Once this change was made, responsiveness improved immediately and reliability increased dramatically.
Overall, Wi-Fi light bulbs are a great product — if you’re using one or two from a phone app. For a whole-house setup, though, they introduce extra dependencies that can become problematic.
In my case, early on I was also running an older consumer router, and as soon as the internet connection dropped (which happened more often than I’d like), lights stopped responding and automations failed. I also ran into issues with the router’s DHCP server, especially when trying to use static IP assignments — something older routers don’t always handle well.
After moving to a UniFi router, and shifting most lighting to Zigbee, the entire system became far more stable. The network now behaves more like a small business setup than a typical home network, and lighting reliability reflects that.
