flat acorn
Have just got zigbee2mqtt going in my home with a few smart bulbs and plugs and looking to get things going a bit further.
Looking at smart switches for some rooms, trying to understand conceptually the difference between a switch that is itself smart (e.g. Aqara E1) and one of the little relay hub things you'd put behind an existing switch (e.g. https://amzn.eu/d/9GeXUOo) - apart from with the latter being able to keep your existing physical switch?
In both cases, when set up correctly, is it right that the physical switch will (or can) continue to work exactly as before - it will turn lights on if they're off, and off if they're on. But in addition, the switch can be controlled remotely and therefore potentially triggered by other things.
Are there reasons to prefer one over the other?
Additionally, I am in the UK but in a quite newly constructed home. I understand that means I may have neutral wires into my light switches. How can I tell? Behind my switches there's a mess of all sorts of wires but most of them are capped off (blue, and green/yellow striped ones), with a few brown and black wires going into the switch. What am I dealing with, and can I get switches/relays that work as zigbee routers?
thorny lotus