Best Retrofit Smart Light Switch to Work With Alexa

[Bert2e]

Does anyone have any experience of smart light switches that work with Alexa to give voice activated lights? I dream of being able to shout at the kitchen lights when I've got my hands full of plates of food! TIA

If you purchase a philips hue starter kit this will do just what you need. The hub is connected to your router. Alexa and Hue integrate and you can then voice control all lighting.

The switch on the wall isn't used at all, unless you need to override for some reason and manually turn on the lights if the wifi goes down for example.

With Hue you can set the lights in many ways. For example, our hall lamp comes on automatically at sunset. I have set a routine so before going to bed I say 'Alexa, Goodnight' and she switches off all downstairs lights and anything on the smart plug, and turns on the lamps in the bedroom. It can be as simple or as complex as you want it to be.

You can do the same with BG Hive, and control the central heating too. They regularly have sales with 20% off so worth waiting for one of these.

In the UK these systems almost never use the light switch and therefore rely on controlling each individual light bulb. So if you have a chandelier with 8 lamps at £20-30 each it gets a bit expensive.

FYI, the reason for this is that usually in the UK the light switch only contains the live cable and not neutral. but any light controller would need to be connected to both live and neutral.

I have a Tado for the heating system as I prefer the geofencing set up. Works very well for us.