Internet Of Things / IoT / Connected Home / Smart Houses

I’ve been through this recently and whilst not exactly answering your question my thoughts are as follows:

• Hue do a switch replacement for normal switches (not the dimmer switch…), but the dimmer switch is nice and as it acts as a remote can have it wherever it works best.
  
• I wanted all my rooms to also be “guest proof” which meant either replacing my main switches or just using them on lamps, as the dimmer switch needs noticing, even if it’s obvious to you.
  
• I also didn’t want all my lights dependant on the inter webs ie I wanted some redundancy in case everything went wrong.
  
• Due to the above two points (and the fact I didn’t want to replace my wall switches) I decided to use the dimmer switches for bulbs in all my lamps + some of the Hue stand along lamps/light strips etc, and keep my “normal” room lights as normal lights.
  
  

I’ve found this gives plenty of light for spaces where I only had one ceiling light, plus with custom colours can give a nicer light so I’ve found I need less light as it’s more spread out across the room

Edit: if you want anyone to be able to control the lights then yes some form of physical switch is needed, although you can set your hue bulbs to turn on when connected back to power (eg power cut or standard switch on/off). But if there is no power then the app can’t find them

If you dont buy the switches and turn the bulbs off via the hue app they wont come back on without effort unless you use the app. They ignore power cycling unless done 4 times in quick succession to reset them to the default state. I find them useful but also incredibly irritating. Not sure if the tp link smart lights are better. They are significantly cheaper though

You can buy various Samotech switch holders that neatly mount the dimmer switches over normal light switches. Personally I'd say they're the best looking option but they're not beautiful. You can pick up the Hue dimmer switch pretty cheap, particularly if you keep an eye out secondhand too.

Generally in rooms I have lamps controlled by hue and the main light, which is rarely used, just normal. In the hall I had motion sensors so the switches were rarely needed and the samotech covers.

There are other options but they either require a fairly high degree of customising to work offline or they may not work when your internet is down. IKEA stuff may be slightly cheaper and will probably add directly to hue (but maybe with a bit of hassle).

The Hue system itself is very robust. Works fine offline when set up (even not connected to a network at all), including all the routines. I can't actually think of a time mine has stopped working and I've been using it for years.

Have one Hue in the bedroom, what we do is we keep it as "on" in the app, set the "Light behaviour at power on" to "Default" (so it's always "on" when powered) and then keep the switch off. You can't turn it on on the app/phone/interwebs if the switch is off (our default bedroom setting) but if you switch it on, it can be turned off/adjusted on the app. Which works for us, kinda.

I've got Hue bulbs everywhere and honestly if I was doing it again I'd perhaps just buy normal Philips LED bulbs (because I do rate Philips) then put a Shelley 1L behind each light switch, with dimmable bulbs and Shelly Dimmers behind the light switches in the rooms where I wanted dimmable.

The problem with Hue bulbs is you spend a load of money on them, but then still need a solution to the light switch problem, and Hue switches are really expensive. I'm now planning on putting 1L's with the bypass (required for lower wattage bulbs) behind most of my light switches and once I've done that I'm not sure how much value the Hue bulbs will actually add.

I should say though that while I've got a Shelley Dimmer and am happy with it I've not actually tested the 1L, although they seem to have a good rep as long as you don't use the original version of the bypass which kept blowing up (use v2 bypasses).