Researcher has developed, at a cost of less than one dollar, a wireless light switch that runs without batteries, can be installed anywhere on a wall and could reduce the cost of wiring a house by …::A U of A engineering researcher has developed a wireless light switch that could reduce the cost of wiring a house by as much as 50 per cent.
Companies: That’ll be $49.99.
You would still need to wire the house with power outlets for phones and lamps… Cutting down on the light switch wiring is interesting but not full on Tesla
Enocean has been making battery free wireless light switches for almost 15 years. I’ve personally used them for about 8 years and love them. They’re a lot more expensive then the $1 quote in the article but still cheaper than an electrician. They work with a strike to a piezoelectric element to make energy and transmit the signal.
I use something like this for my wireless doorbell because people kept stealing the battery. I’ve had it for years and it works really well.
It’s probably someone in his house. They either think the door bell is too loud or need the batteries for another device.
I’ve worked with these professionally, but never actually found a way to purchase them myself. Can you recommend a supplier?
Various companies repackage or license the enOcean parts. I’ve used this one from Amazon for about 6 years and haven’t thought about it. I’ve also used others from this brand for 8+ years and had no issues. I bought an old house around Boston that had power in the ceilings but no switches anywhere so this worked perfectly for me and I was able to do it all myself.
Harvesting stray RF energy sounds like a cool technology for certain niche applications.
But for switching lights in particular, I much prefer smart bulbs vs installing stuff to put the switches in nicer places. It also makes it easy to dim a room or the entire house in the evening.
The conclusion of the research is that solution energy efficient and cheaper. Smart bulbs are nice, but they solve neither of the issues mentioned. They need to be powered on all the time and you still need the switches either way, unless you design your home to be solely smartphone controlled but nobody does that.
Wouldn’t it make more sense to make the light switch the smart part then you can have cheap bulbs. You want the technical bit to be the bit that doesn’t wear out and has to be replaced.
As someone who has smart bulbs and smart switches. The switches are a 1000x more preferable. It’s nice to be able to use my phone, but it fucking sucks needing to use my phone every time I want to control them.
Smart switches are one of the next things I’ll upgrade in the house. But some of my switches control fans as well, so there’s not a huge amount of choice when it comes to finding something that’s compatible and works with some sort of standard instead of having their own app.
Yeah, I agree. And then you can have your override immediately available and not be forced to use your phone all the time, or have to keep the switch on all the time.
If you have smart bulbs and want to turn them off temporarily, you have to do it through your phone or if you use the switch you need to remember to turn the switch back on or you can’t control the bulbs through your phone until you do. Makes so much more sense to have the controllers in the switches instead of the bulbs.
Plus less much heat to wear down the circuits.
For simple use cases, maybe. But if you want to use multi-colored bulbs or turn on only one bulb in a multi-bulb light fixture, you get that granular control with smart bulbs.
As for where I’d want to have the technical bits, what you said makes sense, but led bulbs are also supposed to last a long time. Maybe upgrading their technical bits every several years isn’t a bad thing.
So, I’m not sure this is new. Unless this article is several years old.
These have been around for a fair few years, and it’s a pretty cool idea. Big Clive did a teardown video of a set 2.5 years ago.
So, unless this guy invented this thing considerably before that, I’m going to say it’s a tenuous claim at best.
