As most here know, I'm big into home automation. I have every light in my house (other than a couple bathrooms) automated.

But my house was built in 1999, and the builders decided that almost every room should have a switched outlet (I think there's six in total). Clearly, these are useless to me. It's not very thrilling to turn on a lamp from across the room when I can turn it on from across the world.

Now, part of me wants to take out the switches, wire them to always-on, and slap blank plates on top of them. But this seems silly. It'll look weird and it feels like a waste of a constant power source.

Previously, my automation system was built around ZWave. I'm slowly transitioning it to HomeKit. With ZWave, there's a number of wall controllers that can be wired into a spot like this. These days, I can just use a Hue dimmer switch, which is battery powered and can go anywhere. It's not very power hungry.

So that brings me to my question: what do you think I should do with these switches? Any ideas?

Very non-thrilling answer: I would just leave them be. You'll be very happy you have them if (when?) your home automation system ever goes down.

Dunno what you want to do about the switches. You could do as you suggested, and it will waste zero power having them permanently "on" (just like every other outlet in your house!).

The next owners will want them, if you care about stuff like that (we don't normally).

It is easy to rewire the outlets themselves so that both halves are permanently on, like "normal" outlets, regardless of the switches. And easy to later put them back to switched operation again.

The only thing you cannot do, is bury the switch boxes into the wall with plaster over them. Okay, you can probably also do that if you totally disconnect the live wiring that goes to them first.

Cheers

I use these light switch covers for any lights with traditional switches and home automation bulbs. Easy to bypass but prevents anyone from changing the switch without realizing it.

I probably wouldn't. They only control half of each outlet anyway, and it's only one light in the room. My system hasn't ever been down for more than about 30 minutes after noticing it was anyway. I really don't need these.


We tend to not make many decisions based on what the next folks will like. I'm sure that'll bite us when it comes to selling, but I might as well enjoy my house and not someone else's.


That's an idea, but for some reason I prefer the thought of having a black plate over the switch to having a switch that does nothing. It'll mean buying a new switch if I want to put it back, but these are old toggle switches anyway so I'd put in decoras for the next folks.


Haha, no I never considered that. I skirt codes sometimes but I know that's a big no-no.


I'm not that concerned about the switch getting thrown accidentally, as the switched outlets are wired so only one of the plugs is switched, so I just plug my lamps into the always-on plug. It's not a big deal.


Oh well, I think the blank plate is probably the way I'll go eventually. I'll probably mount a Hue Tap to the front of it.