Beginners Guide to Shelly Relays - Choose The Right Relay For The Job

today on the hookup we're going to take a look at one of the most common smart devices in my house shelly relays i'm going to help you decide which of these four locally controlled shelley relays is right for you i'll show you how to wire them and i'll give you some tips and tricks for setting them up in my opinion the biggest problem with shelley devices is that they all look really similar even though they definitely have different applications a new automator could be easily overwhelmed by all these different devices and end up with the wrong one or just decide to skip shelley all together which i think would be a shame because shelley has done so much right this video isn't sponsored by shelley but it is sponsored by holidaycore.com holiday corer manufactures and sells everything that you need to get started with the holiday light show hobby whether you want to start out with a ready to run controller package or dive in head first and start building your own props holiday coro has you covered as expected prices are lower and technical support is more available during non-peak season so now is the right time to buy for next year check out everything that you need to have the best show on the block using the link in the description when i first reviewed the shelley one in august of 2018 one of the main selling points was how easy it was to add custom firmware like tasmota but in 2019 i stopped bothering with tasmoto on my shelly devices because the factory firmware can function completely locally and it includes protocols like mqtt coap and rest now in 2021 the official shelley home assistant integration literally discovers your shelly devices for you and adds all the available sensors and controls automatically and don't forget we're talking about local control here so feel free to disable the shelly cloud or even block your shelly devices from the internet because they don't need it the current shelley lineup contains about 30 different devices today we're specifically going to look at relays relays are devices that turn power to a circuit either completely on or completely off what makes these shelley devices different from other smart switches is the fact that you're still going to use your existing light switches to control them meaning if you have unique or antique switches you won't need to replace them with tacky looking smart switches so you can upgrade the functionality of your home without destroying the character so which of these four shelley relays is right for you the first thing you need to know is whether your switch location contains a neutral wire some old houses in specific countries put the neutral wire at the load such as at a ceiling light and they only run the hot wires to the switch if you look behind your switch and there are only two wires you don't have a neutral and the shelley 1l is your only option for a relay the shelley 1l has the lowest maximum load of any of the shelley relays at just 4.1 amps continuous which in a 110 volt circuit is 450 watts and in a 220 volt circuit is 900 watts the shelley 1l does have thermal protection on it so it can safely shut off the relay if the load is too high but you still shouldn't try to put more than a 4 amp continuous load on it the shelley 1l works by using magic or what's sometimes called electromagnetic induction which requires a minimum load of 20 watts in order to have enough electricity running through the circuit to power the wi-fi and the relay if you don't have a 20 watt load you can add this device called the shelley bypass in parallel to add load to your circuit the most common way to wire your shelley 1l looks like this with your hot wire source attached to the l terminal and your hot wire load attached to o your switch then gets wired to s1 and sx if you have two switches you can wire them to s2 and sx but that one isn't necessary like i said if you have a 20 watt load you don't need to use the bypass at all but if you do need it it gets installed at your load in parallel like this you can also install the shelly 1l with a neutral but you shouldn't because there's much better options for that if you do have a neutral wire at your switch your next question should be how many circuits do you want to control and how many amps will run through those circuits if you have two switches and each circuit is under 10 amps then you probably want to use shelley's flagship product the shelley 2.5 which is a ul listed device that can be used to control two separate circuits up to 10 amps the shelley 2.5 has two switch inputs two relay inputs power monitoring and overheating protection the most common wiring configuration of the shelley 2.5 looks like this with your hot wire source attached to the l terminal and your hot wire loads attached to o1 and o2 your switches will be connected to your hot wire source on one pole and the sw-1 and sw2 switches on the shelley 2.5 last your end terminal connects to your neutral wire the second l terminal is technically there if you're going to max out the load on both circuits but it typically isn't needed since the two l terminals are just connected internally 10 amps is quite a lot of load per circuit and like the shelley 1l the 2.5 has safety mechanisms built to turn off the relay if your power consumption or temperature are too high but if you plan on controlling a particularly large load like maybe a resistive heater you should use a shelly 1pm which can handle 16 amps the shelley 1pm has a single 16 amp relay thermal monitoring and power monitoring the shelley 1pm is shelley's most heavy-duty relay and on a 220 volt circuit the shelley 1pm can handle 3 500 watts or 1750 watts on 110 volt circuit the most common wiring configuration of the shelley 1pm looks like this with your hot wire source attached to l and your hot wire load attached to o your neutral wire will connect to the end terminal and one side of your switch should be attached to the hot wire source while the other switch goes to the sw terminal there are two l terminals on the shelley 1pm but like the shelley 2.5 you only need to connect both of them if you intend to max out that 16 amp rating and last that leaves us with my favorite shelley device the shelley one shelley one doesn't have thermal monitoring like the 1l pm and 2.5 and it doesn't have power monitoring either but there are a few things about the shelley one that make it my go-to for most small projects first all the shelley relays that we've looked at so far output whatever source voltage they're being powered with directly to the relay output meaning if you power with 110 volts then 110 volts is going to come out of the o terminal when it gets switched on but on the shelley one the relay is isolated and it has what's called dry contacts this means that when you switch on the relay it will connect the eye terminal to the o terminal but no current passes through that circuit unless it's supplied on the i terminal second every relay that we've looked at can be powered using 110 230 volts ac and the shelley 1 2.5 and pm can also be powered with 24 to 60 volts dc but the shelley 1 can also be directly powered using 12 volts dc the extra jumper on the shelley 1 bypasses the voltage regulation circuit to supply the electronics with 12 volts directly this is super useful since a lot of projects utilize 12 volts for things like leds locks and sensors and this allows you to have a single power source it also means that you can feel free to use the sw terminal and the other gpio pins on the shelley for whatever you want when powered with 12 volts because unlike when powering them from mains these will be referenced to ground and are safe to use you shouldn't attempt to use the sw or gpio pins on any other shelley device for low voltage applications because they are referenced to mains voltage and not ground having a dry contact relay does increase the number of wires that you need so it makes sense why shelley omitted it on their other relays but it's super useful in low voltage projects and like i said i almost always use my shelly ones in dc mode which looks like this with the positive dc source connected to the n terminal where it says plus and the negative or ground connected to l where it says minus you can connect whatever you want to the dry contacts of the relay in dc mode the sw input can be used by connecting one side of your switch to a ground and the other side to the sw terminal if you're using 24 to 60 volts dc you should leave the jumper in the factory position but if you want to use 12 volts you need to switch the jumper from regulated to unregulated unfortunately this means that your shelly isn't protected from user error anymore and if you supply it with over 12 volts or you mix up the positive and negative wires your shelley is going to let out its magic smoke and will never work again so pay attention before plugging it in so to summarize no neutral and under 4 amp load you need the shelley 1l standard switch applications under 10 amps load shelley 2.5 high current applications shelly 1pm and dry contact or 12 volt dc applications shelley won there's also one more specialty application of the shelley 2.5 where you can hook it directly to your roller shutters and it will use the 01 and o2 terminals to run the shutter motors in either forward or reverse if you intend to use the shelley 2.5 as a roller shutter control it's also important to set it up that way in the web interface so next let's talk about getting your shelley devices connected to your network my recommended method is to power up your shelly and look for the wi-fi ssid with shelley in the name connect to that hotspot and then open a browser to 192.168.33.1 which will bring you to the shelley web console from this webpage you can switch your shelly on and off and change all of its settings so first let's get the shelley connected to your wi-fi go to internet and security and then wi-fi mode client put in your ssid and password and then hit save your shelly will then reboot and join your network you can access it in a few different ways my preferred method is to log into my router and find the ip address of my new shelly and then navigate straight to that i could also find this using an app like fing after you're connected the next thing to do is get your shelley firmware updated having the latest firmware is going to solve 99 of the issues that you might have with your shelly connecting to the shelley cloud allows you to control your shelly devices via amazon echo and google home using the shelly skill and it can also give you remote access to your shelly devices without needing to set up port forwarding or a vpn but if like me you prefer to use local control only you can disconnect your chalet from the shelly cloud and this is the point where there stops being one best setup and where your setup will heavily depend on what you're using your shelley for for local control the shelly has three options rest mqtt and coap which shelley calls co-iot rest is essentially using http commands to control the shelly and gather information from it but the problem with rest is that it uses polling in other words a hub like home assistant needs to constantly ask the shelley if anything's changed since the last time that they talked mqtt and co-iot are push protocols meaning that the shelley will immediately let your hub know when something gets changed mqtt is a more efficient protocol using less network resources but because it uses a single server for communication that server needs to be set up properly in order for the device to work but since co-iot uses multicast it doesn't really care who's listening it just sends out messages on your local network for anyone to listen for as you can imagine from a security standpoint this means that you wouldn't want to use co-iot on a public network but on a private network it's great because it requires no setup and it allows for new devices to be discovered automatically which is why when you connect your shelley to your network home assistant will automatically discover it and give you a notification to set it up if for some reason that doesn't happen you can add it to home assistant manually by using the shelly integration along with that device's ip address a quick note about this if co-iot isn't working properly then home assistant falls back to the rest protocol if you control your light manually you should see it immediately updated home assisted if there's a lag that means that co-iot isn't working which is most likely because one of your specific network settings for me i needed to disable igmp snooping on my unifi network for co-iot to work properly there are tons of other small settings that you can tweak in this menu but the last thing i'm going to cover are the switch types i mentioned earlier that a major selling point of the shelley relays is the ability to add smart functionality to a completely normal looking switch the inevitable trade-off of this is that sometimes the switch state won't match the state of the lights if you have a lot of two or three-way switches in your house then you're probably already used to this but for some people a switch in the up position means that that light should be on period and anything else is unacceptable the good news is that whatever your opinion on the situation shelley has a switch option for you using the button type menu you can choose momentary for use if your switch is actually a button toggle which will always sync the state of the switch and the light when operating it manually in other words you can still turn it on and off from the app but if you turn the light on and the switch is in the off position then you would first need to toggle the switch up into the on position and then down into the off position in order to turn it back off there's also edge switch which would be most like a two or three-way configuration where the state of the light will change anytime the switch is toggled this means that sometimes you'll end up turning the light on by flipping the switch down but the state of the light will always change with every switch movement the last switch type is called an activation switch that turns on for a specific amount of time and then turns itself back off usually this isn't used for lights but i could see it being effective for something like a bathroom fan wrapping it up you can probably see why shelley devices have gained so much popularity they've built a product line that can satisfy basically every use case that you can imagine whether your sticking point is ul certification no neutral high current low price local control or low voltage or maybe you just want to use your existing light switches the shelly is the best option out there and i'll continue to use them in my projects for the foreseeable future i hope this video helped you figure out which shelly is right for you but if you have additional questions feel free to leave a comment thank you so much to my awesome patrons over at patreon for your continued support on my channel if you're interested in supporting my channel please check out the links down in the description if you enjoyed this video please hit that thumbs up button and consider subscribing and as always thanks for watching the hookup you

Channel: The Hook Up

Views: 79,491

Keywords: home assistant, hassio, home automation, hass.io, smart home, diy, electronics, arduino, esp8266, nodemcu, wemos d1, automation, shelly cloud, shelly 1, shelly 2.5, how to wire shelly 1 l, shelly 2.5 installation, smart switch, shelly 2.5 wiring, shelly 2.5 home assistant, shelly 2.5 vs shelly 1, shelly 1 wiring, shelly 1pm, shelly 1 light switch, shelly cloud alexa, shelly cloud mqtt, smart home gadgets, smart home ideas

Id: mJFSI81m5wo

Length: 13min 10sec (790 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 02 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/RealisticExtent]

Great content, really helpful. To be honest this the kind of basic descriptions and buying guide that are needed on the Shelly website itself.

[u/icoup]

I have a location I'm looking at putting a Shelly that doesn't have amazing WiFi coverage. It works but isn't amazing.

Anyone have any experience using these are at the edge of good WiFi coverage? Still reliable? Do they need good coverage?

[u/yesterdayshero11]

The only thing missing from this video was the Shelly Dimmer 2. I plan on installing a heap of Shelly's and was going to go with the Dimmer so it gives me the flexibility to have lights come on at different brightness depending on time of day/night. As well as not needing a neutral.

Would've liked to have heard some more about their real world usage. But still a good video nonetheless.

[u/IH8DwnvoteComplainrs]

Man, I've gone all zwave, but the cost of these is veeerry appealing. I'm questioning if I actually care if I have a handful of wifi devices on my network. The price sure is attractive for these.