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An overview of the smart switches and dimmers I have used

This post is an overview of my research on smart switches and dimmers, and what I'm using for our house.

Note that our house has been renovated in 2017, including all new electrical so all of our switches have a neutral wire. If you don't have a neutral wire, you won't be able to use all smart switches. You can check out Lutron Cresta which works without a neutral wire.


Wemo Smart switch (1st gen, non-dimmer):

This is the first smart switch I used when we bought our house:

The app is easy to setup and I was able to connect this with Amazon Alexa and Google Home pretty easily.

I like the fact that it is a single push button to toggle on and off. I haven't had too many issues after several years of ownership, other than occasionally I've had to re-connnect the Wemo account to google, but I think it's only been a few times in the past 3 years.


Leviton Decora smart wi-fi dimmer: 

This is the dimmer I'm using in two of our bedrooms. I like the customization options in the app which lets you control timing of fade/in out and various other settings including the LEDs on the switch itself. This one also connected up with Google Home and Amazon Alexa without any problems.

I picked this over the Lutron Caseta system since my house does have a neutral wire. If it did not, I would have gone with Lutron Caseta.


Leviton Smart Wi-fi outlet:

This is actually just a replacement outlet receptacle, but I've found it works well for one scenario we have with our lamp in the corner of the living room. This gives us voice control to turn on/off the lamp, which would otherwise be unused because the switch is a little hard to reach. I'm using this over one of the plug in smart switches because I wanted the plug to be flush with the wall due to the furniture we are using.

If you don't want to install or have installed an outlet like this, then you can use one of the plug in options, for example one from Wemo.




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