I’ve been playing with home automation for a few years now and wanted to stop relying on 3rd party cloud software for the devices I run at home. I also wanted to stop connecting my IoT devices to my wifi in order to control them. In order to do this, I needed a zigbee or z-wave hub. One of my friends has a hubitat elevation and recommended it it to me so I ordered one to try it out.

What do I need this for? The lights in my duck house aren’t quite bright enough to cover the space adequately. The duck house is also a high humidity, high dust environment. We currently have 19 chickens and 10 ducks sleeping in there (they free range during they day). Before getting these, I was using two Lifx BR30 bulbs which overall worked fine, but had a few drawbacks: They are wifi only If the power goes out they turn back on Not meant for harsh environments Eventually I may write a review of those but not today.

As part of my move away from cloud based IoT devices I’ve been looking for a zigbee switch I could use to automatically turn the lights in my duck house on and off. I got the hubitat on a recomendation from a friend and managed to find these zigbee toggle switches that should work with it. After spending a few hours rewiring some of the electrical in the duck house (I’m not an electrician) and managing to not burn it down, I flicked the switch on and the lights came on!

My experience owning a Nest Protect