How To Use Smart Relays - 101 (Featuring The NEW Aqara Relay Module T2)

smart relays are super useful but they can be really hard to understand if someone's using them they're usually hidden behind a wall and you'd never know and these devices mix smart home connectivity with the physical and the electrical World in your home so today I'm going to give you a beginner's guide to getting into smart relays and I'm going to do it by featuring a brand new device from aara now this is the new dual relay module T2 it's capable of AC or DC powering wet or dry contact control and it's a dual relay so it can control two things at once it has power monitoring communicates through zigg and can even be used with the new matter standard that means it can control everything from light switches and wall outlets to things like your garage door opener and it can even be used with motors like rollers for curtains or blinds and there's a ton it can do so you'll be seeing much of this today as we go through smart relays [Music] 101 hello automator thanks for tuning in again I'm Brian from automate life and we're going to go through smart relays because they are something that a lot of us struggle to use right and I'm featuring the new aara dual relay module T2 for a few reasons aara has SP sponsored today's video and they're always great with letting me make the kind of video I want so it's an absolute pleasure to work with these folks and I have to thank them this type of video I think is a lot more useful than a simple review and that's because this is one of the most full featured relays out there today cuz you can often find relays that do uh one of the things or a couple of the things that the t2 does but this relay has pretty much every feature that smart relay tend to have there's a few things missing but this lets me address a beginner's guide really well as a focal point and one other thing if you're finding some of the terms that I'm using a little difficult you can leave a note in the comments or you can actually check out some of our other 101 level videos which are in the description as well now I have to address one other thing before I go any further in this video relays are a highly technical device therefore at a bare minimum you should be vetting all of your diagrams with an electrician and in a lot of cases should be using an electrician for installation in fact that's my recommendation now I'm not an electrician and while I do have a background in electrical engineering I will be providing you what I can but I'm not a professional electrician and all of this is what I've learned and is not professional advice there I had to caveat this whole thing because everyone's so dark AR litigious these days but let's start with an explanation of what a smart relay is and what it does a smart relay is like a light switch without that physical button at least most of the time it allows you to open and close circuits just like a light switch does now when you flick a light switch up you're normally opening the circuit there and stopping your light bulb from receiving the current it needs to turn on then when you close a switch you're providing that current and the light turns on a smart relay allows you to do this using software and through home automation in this case we can use a car's application and then connect it to other platforms to use your favorite voice assistant or other automations routines and apps things like Amazon Google home Apple homekit and Samsung smart things just to name a few those can all be used to open and close the relay contacts just like physically operating a switch so some relays allow you to do this with more than one circuit or switch which is what the Dual relay module means on this device it allows you to control two circuits and when you see it show up in the aara app and most apps it has two separate controls and you can name them independently so if you stick this behind a set of light switches you can name each one for the different lights or different things that it controls each relay has its own set of specifications for what it can control and what it can't it also has specifications for the type of power that you can bring in so for example the Dual relay module T2 can accept both AC and DC power input with an AC input it can handle up to 25 500 watt of power throughput it has a maximum of 10 amps and that is specific to being used with things like incandescent lights the ratings change based on the type of electronic you're using with it you can see that Motors and different types of Lights have different ratings associated with them these specifications need to be paid attention to because a relay will often have certain types of protection on it but depending on the device you buy it might not be really well protected and since most relays sit inside of your wall or inside of a housing of some sort you want that protection so that issues are handled inside the device and they'll get worse inside of your wall so what I'm saying is you want the relay to trip offline or open the contact so that it doesn't eventually burn and cause a fire now you'll notice that the DC ratings of the Dual dual relay module are restricted to resistive loads and that's an important component a motor is not a resistive load and I'm not going to go into all the different types of loads but when powering this by DC you would not be able to run a motor I mentioned that the Dual relay module T2 has some protection on it and it has both overload and overheat or what we call thermal protection on it so if the device itself is getting too hot or if there's too much amperage running through it it's going to protect itself and trip offline relays have things like temperature and humidity ratings and you should pay attention to those but something that every smart relay has is a wireless communication method or protocol the Dual relay module T2 use a zigby and you will need a zigby hub from aara with it at least in most cases that's where you're going to get all of the different settings that I'll be talking about today and where you will get the most features this may work with other smart home hubs but I won't be addressing all of that today you'll see a few things that I did but we won't spend a lot of time on that because the point is most of these relays work best with the app from the manufacturer and that's just because you get all of the settings that you will need to manage these device in those apps now let's start getting into how a relay works and I'm going to break down all of these different contacts on the t2 as I do that you should start to understand what some of these terms on electrical diagrams mean I'm going to start describing some of the ways that you wire a relay but these are just some of the basics to get you started you'll notice that every smart relay has a set of holes in the top at least this is the case for every relay I've seen what you do is you open it up by unscrewing the little screw and then you insert a cable in and then screw it back back down in order to make a connection one thing that you should think about is having a good pair of wire strippers because you need to only strip so much off of the jacket on the cable you're using you really shouldn't have bare wire be any longer than the depth of the hole you're inserting it into now some of those words make me giggle a little bit but you really just shouldn't see bare conductor or bare wire sticking out because if you do you could end up shorting out two cables as these relays can make an electrical box very crowded now in a lot of cases you will see connections on wiring diagrams that look like this it's just two lines or more than two lines intersecting you could see a little dot being used to represent that connection Point what both of those things mean is that you are connecting cables together a lot of creators or videos on YouTube will call that a pigtail because you twist the wires together but I like using Wago connectors as they are a simple way to connect two or more cables you simply insert the cable and push down the little physical switch and I have Wago connectors that go all the way up to five different cable connection points again you want to strip the wires to the right length and you want those connections to be really good now what I mean by that is really important the way that many electrical fires start is in four ways the first way is just to exceed the ratings of the relay you have to pay attention to those we've already talked about that the second way is to incorrectly wire something and the Third Way is to short or connect two wires that shouldn't be connected and the fourth way is to make a bad connection now the amount of fires that I've seen created by a wire that was not fully connected to the surface that it was intended to be connected to it's just about every fire I've seen personally and I've seen hundreds okay so electrons flow across the surface of the two connecting sides and heat is generated by those electrons flowing across the surface so if you have more surface you will have less of a buildup of Heat versus when you have less surface and all of that heat is being put into a small surface area the buildup of heat gets much worse when you have actual gaps too because the electrons all depending on the voltage can jump across distances in air and that heats up the air very fast and we usually see fires off of that just like lightning now it's more complicated than that but you just want the connection to be solid and you want to use as much wire as you can to make that connection but then not leaving wire exposed so you end up with other wires touching it or with a short now what is a short it's more or less touching two wires together that shouldn't be touching that means current flows somewhere you don't want it to and it usually results in a melted relay or worse yet melted components in your wall and that is one of the biggest things that you will have to pay attention to a relay is adding a lot of physical material into an electrical box and you just PL might not have the space to put it in there with all of the excess cabling you're going to be putting in your wall and the excess physical device and finally just so I don't have to say this a ton throughout the video you need to turn off the power before wiring anything in obviously if you're just connecting cables into the relay and the relay is not powered you don't have any power to turn off but as soon as you go into a wall Outlet or a light switch or anything with power on disconnect the power by turning off your breaker and then making sure that you test that that power is gone also before you turn off the power make sure that your pen tester is working use an outlet that you know is powered and it will show you that your meter is working by starting to beep or Flash all of this to say that you should get an electrician to help you okay but let's talk about we physically see on these relays and some of the contacts and what they mean now the t2 has a large number of contacts on it and you will find other smart relays have many less contacts on them because they're trying to do less than this one is you're going to find similar things on other smart relays but here I'm going to break up the contacts into three sections but before we do that you will notice that there's a difference between AC powering and DC powering when it comes to a DC powered relay this one specifically gives you a positive terminal and it shows a number of negative terminals however only the furthest most right terminal or contact is to be used for the negative side of your DC power now when we talk about AC powering this Relay can go from 100 to 250 volts so it's ready for both the European and the North American Standards you'll also notice that it's 50 or 60 hertz power which is an important distinction for the different Power Systems around the world North America uses 60 HZ power and uh Europe and most of Asia uses 50 HZ power so this relay is actually potentially capable of doing 220 volt at 60 or at 50 htz let's break up these contacts now on the right hand side we have an l and an N these are carrying the power in your home to and from the source so you're utility the L stands for live this is sometimes referred to as the hot wire think of it like it is the source of the voltage in your box this can often directly connect to your electrical panel in your home although live wires can sometimes be run through multiple switches or Outlets depending on how your home was wired so this is always carrying current it's the serious wire the n stands for neutral and this specific relay requires a neutral some don't but they are few and far in between and relays that don't have a neutral requirement can often be restricted in what they can do and in their specifications the neutral wire carries electricity back to the power source or it completes the circuit for electrical current to move through your home you have to have a full circuit now often the neutral is connecting to a ground or what is called a bus bar back at your panel it's a big piece of metal now here's the funny thing with neutrals they may or may not be carrying current but you do have to assume that they always are the other part of most new homes is a ground wire and there is no pin for a ground wire on this relay so you won't be connecting a ground to this device specifically but you will often have a ground wire that already connects to your light switch or your outlet or whatever you're using now let's move to the left side of this relay you'll notice that there's an L1 and an L2 contact these are the load contacts for the two devices you can control so if you were controlling a light switch and you wanted to use L1 this would be the cable that heads to the light bulbs there is no difference between L1 and L2 they just allow you to control two separate electronic devices if you'd like now the L out and Lin pins are there to let you switch between what's called a wet and a dry contact mode this takes a bit of explanation so stay with me the Ln pin always has the power coming from your Live Wire that means if you wire in 120 volt AC power the Lin pin will have that also the L out pin does not carry that power and what you will find is that anytime we are trying to use the 100 to 250 volt AC power from our homes that you will have to use an included jumper cable between the Lin and L out contacts that essentially brings the power over to your load contacts so the L1 and L2 ones that's what we called wet contacts they are using the power to drive the loads that is provided on the live side over to those loads so it's the same power in as the same power out but a dry contact means that you want to use whatever voltage and current is available within the circuit that your load is using the best example of that is your garage door opener which can often be a very low voltage and extremely uh low current when you press the button on your wall you're essentially closing the circuit but you're not using that 120 volt power that's in North American home homes so a dry contact is for those devices that don't need the full power from your home you're going to know this going into any project but I think for most applications people will be using the wet contact method and therefore be using the included jumper cable on this specific relay now the last set of contacts are on the bottom of this relay they are the S1 S2 and Comm contacts S1 lines up with L1 so the way the relay works is that when you physically close S1 using let's say your existing light switch it will reflect that on the L1 line and close that circuit that way your physical switch still works but you also have this other automated control method with all your automation tools the same is true of S2 which lines up with L2 now the Comm line is usually just the other side of your physical switch I'll show an example in just a few moments as we will now move to a number of examples for how to use Smart relays in your home I'm going to show you diagrams wiring methods and methods for getting some of your biggest use cases working but first we need to power up the relay this is a good practice I think and a good introduction to working with a relay so let's get to it within the specifications of every smart relay you will find something called the minimum load rating and if you don't find that then you need to get it from the company's support line for the t2 from aara it has no minimum load requirement which means I can power it without providing a load without providing for example a light bulb to connect to it so I don't need to connect a light bulb in order to power this on and to have it work correctly now most relays you can do that but you need to talk to the company before doing what I'm about to show you everybody I know has a spare cable that looks like this it'll have the three prongs and you could use a two-prong cable truthfully but just make sure that the cable has a rating equal or greater than your relay in terms of current and voltage as well then you cut one end of the cable based on the length you would like to have and then you strip down the two cables here in North America you can see that I'm plugging the black alive on my relay again check with a professional because this is a moment where you can blow up your relay then I have put electrical tape over and closed off my ground pin because again don't have a ground pin on this relay then this is a cable that can power the relay in order to set it up and it has a secondary use case for those dry contact scenarios this is really easy to use with a garage door opener because this allows you to run the power to a nearby Outlet instead of trying to connect it into the physical garage door opener in some weird way and once you power on the relay you have access to the setup process which for the t2 means that I can open up the aara application go to add a new device and find the t2 this specific relay requires a zig hub from aara to be found and then it uses that going forward for communication to and from the relay now some sometimes those electrical boxes or those places we're going to put this relay in are really difficult for zigg or Z-Wave or other types of wireless communication to get out of now you'll notice this little wire and this flat black piece coming out of the relay this is the zigg antenna and you can't cut that off for this relay to communicate if you're having trouble communicating to your relay then you might want to relocate that little antenna just a little bit inside your wall with other relays you might not have that opportunity but as you get this connected to the aara app you will see that you get to name two separate devices you can also choose a different icon per relay and a different usage case the choices are switch light fan or an other type of device once those are set you can control the two loads connected to the relay with a simple onoff button control in the app we will go through the different settings on this this specific relay in a little while but for now if you're taking this step then I would always open the relay contacts that means you turn off each device and leave them off the reason I say that is when you go to wire this into something else and then you power on the relay you won't instantly connect it to whatever load you have attached it to it's just a safety thing but in general you don't want that to happen now keep in mind that many relays don't need you to take that first step but that cable I just showed you how to make will be used in most dry contact situations now let's move on to using this relay with a wall outlet to make it smart it's actually really easy to do but I'm also going to show you how sometimes when you get into your wall things are a little bit different and we need to modify our plan I'm also going to show you how you can wire up a lot of different devices in your home in the same way as the wall outlet so this works for a lot of situations let's go all right so we're going to wire up an outlet but I'm going to show you how just about every time you get into your home's electrical system something's different and I mean I even had these boards made up and I asked for a simple diagram and you know things are a little bit different here cuz we tried to do a few extra things this is what happens now we're going to use our aara relay that has the l l in and L out pins tied together or jumpered uh that's because we're using wet contact mode and that's because we're getting the power directly here okay that's the way I'm going to explain it now when you go into most Outlets this is what you're going to find ignore these two cables right here you're going to find a cable coming in and it's going to go into the switch on one side and then you're going to find another cable coming in going to the switch on the other side and then you will find a third potentially bare conductor maybe green conductor that is your ground cable but what I found when I came into this was a second pair and that's because they have Daisy chained these two things together now in a lot of homes what'll happen is you'll have a daisy chained wall outlet or a set of wall outlets because we have this relay there's a number of different ways that we can wire this in and it gets complicated to explain some of this but if we just wanted to wire this in I got a number of diagrams here if we just wanted to wire this in with a single relay controlling everything this is the kind of diagram we would use what's happening is we're coming from the source we're coming into the line of this relay and then essentially okay it's more complicated than this there's a switch inside and this is what you're closing or opening when you turn on the relay for L1 or switch one okay that's what you're closing right there again it's more complicated but then if you close that if you turn it on then it provides power over to the line side that's this side okay this switch tells me it says hot on it uh I can tell for other reasons with the colors of cables things like that the other thing that we will have to do is we will have to modify our neutral okay so we go neutral and then you're noticing we're going into the relay okay into its neutral Port right there and then we are also going into the neutral on this now in this case this is our white cable right here and I've already explained a little bit how neutrals work but essentially all of your neutrals are tied together and they all go back to the source eventually and that's where everything goes back to if it needs needs to okay all of these neutrals are tied together but what's Happening Here is a pigtail or a connection of two wire so we're going to go into the relay and we're also going to go into the outlet now what happens over here on the load side so we have this load and we're going into the load of our or the live sorry I should say that right uh the live or the hot side of our Outlet one but we're also pigtailing off and we're going over to the live side of our other Outlet so in this case when we look here I can tell by looking in my box and the way this was wired in so this black was over here it was connected to the hot this white was connected over on the neutral side um so I know that this is going over here so this Cable in my diagram is right here okay so I just have to pigtail off of a load cable to go to both uh so I really just need one cable tie it together and then I got to come this way now there is another diagram that we could create and a different scheme that we could create here so what if we want to control both of the wall outlets individually okay so I I had drawn this wrong the first time and this is where you know you need to be looking at things really objectively really thinking about what you're doing and make sure you have a professional involved but you know I had two cables I had this second cable going to my second outlet outlet uh and instead what I'll be doing is I'll be plugging that into L2 and so we're just going over to that switch with that cable and now I will have individualized control keep in mind that that is restricting ratings to the entire thing okay you have to be careful with that so this is the way I'm going to wire it up today but it's diagrams like these that you need to create for yourself and have checked with an electrician if you're going to try and perform this work yourself just because it's it's very easy to do I'm going to connect this Cable in but look look at how much space I have here so this is something that you want to deal with like these are not nearly as deep as your other contacts or your other connections that will have been made so I've cut it way way down and I mean that's as much conductor as you need with this one then it's going in and I'm going to tie this down now and we're actually wired up for that second Outlet uh we'd have to we have to deal with the neutral but we're actually wired up for it so now I'm going to attach the live side the hot side and that of course is going in to the live side of this this you see I've got too much cable again with a threaded cable you know after you get it cut you just want to you want to get it uh tied together well now on the neutral side of things we got to get a little a little smarter this is the neutral coming from my box okay it's on the right hand side that's how I know my power cable is over here on this box so that's how I know you're going to have to figure that out in your own home what direction things are coming from now just so this is really clear to you I have a waggo connector it has three pins on it you can buy these much larger than this there are three lines coming into that dot okay I draw them with a DOT not everyone does but one in one out to here and one out to here so when your diagram has all of that you need a three pin connector now the truth is I could connect this other neutral right to here and then um I would have four four dots right or four lines out this one's in and I just close that down now it's in there I don't have any white cable don't get so angry at me in the comments but I don't so I'm going to put this one in here I could cut down that cable too like you don't need so much cable and you know honestly you should have less on these extra cables that you're you're working with like this should probably only be this long so now I've got two cables in on my neutral I've got another yellow cable so at least my cables are colorcoded you know I'm in so much trouble with the electricians like they are this I'm just I'm making this a little easier on myself I'm using the connection points on my existing wall outlet now guys in case you're not noticing there's no way I'm fitting this in my wall box all of this like if that's not clear right now it should be clear and while I'm here might as well do this last one and get all my neutrals dealt with so then my neutral side of the diagram is done this one too okay don't get too mad at me about the colors of the cables okay now we actually only have one additional cable to do and then we're ready to power this up the cable we're doing is our L1 to our hot side okay so for that I've purchased some additional cable that matches the amperage in my home and you have to make sure of that okay so I prepped a cable now you'll notice this end is a little bit longer than this end this is a 14 gauge cable right here okay so that helps you to understand the size it's how much material essentially is in here and it also helps you to understand ratings now this cable you can see rated 200 Celsius uh and it will have an amperage rating that is different per area per country okay so I'm not going to give you the rating of this cable okay that's tied down down and then this has just got to go over here somewhere now let's review I have everything wired up and I think things are going to work just right I've gone through my diagram a couple of times I've relooked at my wiring so I've checked everything I can obviously we could have still made a mistake but you're trying to eliminate as much of that as you can you can see no bare conductors coming out of this that's great we can see no bare conductors on any of the connection points and I've given them all little tugs I had one come out I didn't put that in right uh and they're not coming out now you don't want to rank on things but just make sure that they're not coming out and honestly at this point we have to try and fit everything in the box now look this is a big deal right I can't even get that in the Box I could maybe do that but the depth of this box so one of the biggest things that you need to make sure of is that your relay actually fits inside okay and that is uh you know you're going to get the sizing Dimensions but think of all these extra cables that you would have to fit in here too now for me what I'm going to do is I'm going to plug this in all of you safety People Get Ready get a little bit angry at me as I do this with the conductors a little bit exposed uh okay so we're turning it on okay so now I have power to this but these are not closed okay and I've labeled them one and two so one because I've wired it into this outlet should turn on that outlet now I heard it I heard it come here and now I have power to that and we haven't turned on this yet so individually wired and working at this point so now I have individual control of these two devices this would allow you to individually control two outlets or anything that's Daisy chained in your home so this scenario can work very well of course you have to pay attention to the ratings of everything in here and that's where you want to check your diagrams and you want to check how much load you'll be able to put in based on the requirements and the restrictions on this I just want to explain something that's going to happen when you look at these diagrams this should set you free a little bit uh this is the diagram I had just drawn but my relay is a little bit well it's sideways so with these standard loads I've I've drawn this as an outlet that's why he's got a little happy smiley face but almost every time with the standard loads it really won't matter uh what type of load you have here you're going to do three things basically every time you're going to tie together the neutrals okay you're going to disconnect the live and instead of that live going into the live side of the original device you're going to go in to the live side of your relay then you're going to tie the live side to your L1 or could be your L2 now for most of these loads you will have that jumper pin in between L1 or l in and L out this is going to be something very consistent as a structure when you go to wire and things and when you get into the wall you're in general going to find the ground the live or the hot and the neutral into your device and this is going to be the method that you use to wire in a lot of these things so I've seen this type of a diagram used for a lot of different things in including like uh electric floor heating now most people are probably going to try to use a relay to make their light switches smart now one of the great things about relays is that you can usually still use your physical light switch after you've wired this in at least that's if it's one that's ready for that and with a module like this you can actually wire in two different light switches at the same time let's go so this would be your standard light switch kind of the diagram for a single pole light switch now I haven't connected a neutral you might have your neutral connected to your light switch but regardless what's happening is live into the one side of the switch and then we go out to the load to the bulb to whatever else now this could be a fan this could be a lot of different loads and this is looking very similar to our standard loads diagram there's barely any differences between uh these so it's really the same thing again and again when we add in the relay so we're going into the neutral of the relay and we're going in to the live here we're removing these connections to the light switch and and we're also removing the connection to the bulbs themselves so if you didn't want to use the switch at all this is all you would do you could other than the ground which you want to think about in your electrical box you could actually just remove this switch it's not it's not necessary and now you have all of your automated controls over here on your relay the difference with a light switch versus many of the other things is we might want to use the relay's ability to control based off of a light switch so what happens in this case is again the load side it mirrors that L1 so that's all you have to kind of think about here is into there the live side it's going to come down that that means I'm those lines are not touching by the way and there you go so this allows this light switch to tell the relay what to do with your L1 load contact so to turn that on and off so in this case really all this is doing is closing a little circuit for the Relay to know okay time to turn that on and just because I'm sure many of you will ask what happens if you add a second light switch is that the common is your live so you're going to end up tying together the two lives of your light switches they will come into the common the load will come in to S two from that second switch so I've got light switch one light switch two I'm just going to put the live right here just to make this easier on me okay just on my drawing and then on this side I'm going to put the load side and this I'm going to skip that come out here and now we're into S2 with the load side of this one and of course the only other thing that we have to add is that bulb from our Source too so okay so now we have our load 2 connected into bulb 2 we have our load one our bulb one connected into load one and we have the load sides of these light switches going into S1 and S2 uh directly now obviously I've got a two-way switch okay or sometimes called a single pole all right now that's that's it it's an on and off switch and we want to add this to the Dual relay module of course as always first step pull the power now the second step is obviously to open things up and start having a look inside you may or may not see uh your switch connecting or having three different pins on it for if you count the ground ground is often indicated by that little green screw there but it's going to depend on your own place and the switches that have been used and where you are in the world now there will be in some cases little labels on these different pins but actually in my case I don't have that now there's kind of easy ways to to test out you know if you bring power into the box and you bring the pen tester up to a pin let's say you bring it up to here and you do have power in this box obviously you need to be very careful when doing this but you can test to see if there's power here when the light is not on and you can conversely test if there's power here again when the light is not on when you find no power that is your load that is the cable that's going to your light bulb so that can help you just to get started this one is going to my load now I can tell because if you look down here if I remove some of these other cables you'll see that this is on the right hand side it's heading this way this other black cable is my live or my hot that is always what we're looking for to put into the live side of our relay I also have these white lines here these are my neutrals they're not being used currently in this switch config configuration you can see I have a waggo connector and I have two cables tied together but uh maybe I was smart enough to put that third there for what we're about to do now there's a number of ways to wire this in but really only one way that makes all of the different settings and all of the different features of this relay work correctly now I I've tried to simplify how this is all going to work for you a little bit but I realize this stuff gets confusing here okay we wired from our load side of our switch into the S1 the switch one okay we wired the live side into the common to the Comm Port okay this is going to allow this switch as it opens and closes to tell the relay that load one is being turned on or turned off by the switch okay the second piece is that we have wired in three cables now our original load cable and our L1 cable are ready to go these have to be tied together okay this is so that whenever we turn on L1 that the load gets turned on or the light bulb in this case the line side also has to be tied together so we can kind of put our load over there and we have from the line and the line now this obviously is going to be hot all the time when power is on in your home or in this box so just keep that in mind this little connector always has voltage so just to recap our switch is wired in physically to these bottom ports the load side goes into S1 which matches up directly with L1 that's because we're tying our loads to the switch now that doesn't mean that this switch is necessarily going to turn on our lights that is what our uh settings here will determine so let's just turn this on see how it performs so I've just turned everything on I have my switch in the off position and to turn that on turns on my light bulb turn it off turns off my light bulb now you'll notice there was a little bit of a delay there it's not as instantaneous as it was the reason for that is it's going through this this and the relay is actually turning on and off that L1 now why is it doing that well I'm going to go into my device settings there's a couple of things that you need to look at the switch type I have a rocker type switch okay so that is being put in of this if I choose disabled and I hit save look nothing happens okay so you can disable your switch in that moment okay I'm going to go back to rocker type now it's on or off it's correctly mimicking this physical switch the other thing that you can do is convert the S1 to a wireless switch okay so now you see S1 is Just Wireless this is no longer working okay this would be the right way to do it with a rocker switch you leave it with the switch type being rocker type convert it to wireless switch mode I think that's the way that I would do it in general you could just disable the switch too this is up to you there you go now I have the device I think it's working the right way so I'm going to turn that on and you can see my switch is not on so the way it works now if my relay is on I turn it off okay my relay goes off if my relay is on and I turn the switch on it's acting like a three-way device there so primary control is actually whatever you're controlling it from and I think that's a really important piece uh to how you want to work with these relays in general whatever is your next thing that you're switching you're kind of telling it okay change state right so this switch it could be reversed now and that's something to keep in mind after this it's going to get more and more complicated to add additional switches and a different configuration so I'm not going to go through all of those different wiring diagrams but you have this basis now where you understand this is your physical world and it gets translated to the uh relay World okay the electrical world now that we've handled those two basic situations in your home I think it's pretty obvious that you need to be making sure that you have the space inside of that electrical box that is something that you want to chat with an electrition about so that you know how to fit everything inside the Box in your specific case in some situations you might actually have to expand the Box behind the wall or you might just have to cut down some cables and deal with it in the future if you ever replace that relay but let's go on to one of the most often used situations which is those pesky garage door openers I'm going to show you how to get this wired in but I'm also going to explain a lot of the nuances with garage door openers and what you might find when you start this process one of the most common use cases for a relay like this is to deal with garage door installations now there's actually some really interesting options with the aara uh T2 now I'm just going to draw this out quickly here's my live here's my neutral we've been through a number of these diagrams and unfortunately with most garage doors when you're dealing with the contacts in the door you don't want to be hitting them with 120 volt AC fully okay so when we're talking about our relay we have to move into dry contact mode now this is something that you need to understand about your garage door but it's easy to understand it and I'll show you how to do that what you do have to do is you have to connect in your live and your neutral to power this is just for Relay power okay so this gives the relay the power it needs to communicate now we have done that already really early in today's video with this cable okay so you're actually just going to connect that in going to show you that just a moment the next thing you're going to do and this is what you should be doing before you even try to buy this okay is you're going to take a little cable just like this the same size as what you have out on your garage door and aara gives you this cable but you're going to take this out okay cuz we're moving to dry contact mode so that is out now what you're going to do with this is you're going to touch this to the two contacts for the two wires coming from your garage door controller and you're just going to make that touching connection and you're going to see if your garage door moves so obviously you got to make sure no one's around your garage door you're doing this safely but you're going to make that connection if that works then then you can use the relay for your garage door if it does not you've got something more complex this is not necessarily going to work if it does work then what you're going to do is you're going to take those two wires from your garage door controller and you're going to connect them to your L out and your L1 and that's actually all you have to do for a garage door now a lot of us have Smart Home sensors that have relay contacts on them and that would allow me to then take the two contacts from that and put it in to the S1 and the Comm ports and you're able to put that into the S1 and Comm and that would give this the ability to know if the door had been opened you can buy lotss of wired contact sensors that can go directly in into there so uh there are some restrictions on the voltage and amperage of that kind of a thing but you know you could just do this and then you could separately use a door sensor uh from any number of companies maybe a car's Door and Window sensor put that on there put that on your garage door and then you'll know both of those things at the same time so let's go try and do this in my garage before I head out to my garage door with this relay I'm going to prep it okay I've taken out my jumper cable okay that's out of there the next thing I'm going to do is I have this cable that I prepped earlier in the video the white is going into my neutral and the black is going in to my live or my hot and then I'm going to tie these two into our relay if I wanted to add that wired contact sensor I could put it in to my S1 and my com ports I'm not doing that in my home today no the one thing I'll tell you you should probably do before you head out there and put this in your garage plug in your relay turn it on and then go into the aara home app or just on the relay here make sure that that blue light is turned off that means no contacts are closed so what that will mean is when you go to plug in all your cables you won't instantly move your garage door okay and you can check in the app the other thing you can do is unplug your cable wait a few seconds plug it back in make sure that those contacts don't suddenly go closed because of an automation okay so this into there there you go that's how I came up to this you can see this one says infrared sensor so that's this cable and then plus and minus plus when I pull one of these cables out my button over there goes dark so you can see it's got a red light on it now and now it doesn't so that's how I was able to tell that this was coming from my push button so now it's just connecting these two into the L1 and the L out of my uh relay and then plugging in up there with my power cable I've got as thin of gauge of wire as I could find and I'm just going to start prepping a couple of things now I'm going to cut a couple of lengths of these and I'm going to keep them fairly consistent just so that I can get a little distance from the door with the relayer from the garage door opener with the relay now I'm going to make a couple of these pins a good length but not like a crazy length so we're just going to wire strip there we go and then this is how I twist them okay I'm just holding them that's because this cable is threaded okay and then I'm going in to here be a little careful with this snap that down now it's stuck in there okay now one of these is going into our relay there it is you can see that's a shorter end and that one I'm putting in to L1 we're going to tie that down it's not going to pull out this is going into L out okay all right so now this and this cable are going to go into the existing garage door opener and mine is really really deep deep uh so I'm going to make these quite long so that I make a good connection now when I'm out there at my garage door I will be putting the cables from my uh from my existing garage door opener into here I'm hoping this isn't too much copper to kill that signal I'm really hoping that it will stay in this Wago connector okay set that all down set this up here two of those through okay and then this is going in my Wago okay that's in there good connection now we got to do this one open this up okay now we have to connect in the black to here because this is threaded it could be a little difficult get that in there pull a little bit to the side okay now we've got this okay and we'll just put this in there I'm going to pull a little bit that way so these don't touch they're too long so I'll strip those after uh but now I just have to plug this in and everything should work let's see okay this didn't turn on which is what we wanted now we did want to see this keep working that's perfect right that has to continue to work and because we connected the three cables together it continues to work now let's see there you go let's try it there you go easy you might have to play with the settings but in general that's working great so I have everything wired up for this switch one to be a garage door opener but you do need to make some modifications in terms of how you are controlling things now the the power off memory I think in general you do want it to say remember last date or always off after power is restored you don't want a pulse to come through and then open your garage door and speaking of which I've switched my switch type to a button type that actually didn't seem to matter but uh I'm going to do that anyway just because it's accurate in case a car ever updates settings and then that does matter I didn't convert this to a wireless switch cuz I'm not using uh the sensor in this okay so you'll want to think about that if you do put a sensor in there I believe you'll have to turn that on so that the sensor maybe going open by accident uh doesn't cause your door to start opening interlock mode I'm not going to use that the device mode this is the biggest change now I changed mine to dry contact pulse mode because if I use the jumper cable and I put it into the two contacts then the garage door just moved full it went open to fully closed or uh fully closed to fully open it was taking a single connection as a pulse okay the pulse width is how long that pulse is going to be for so I had to set mine around 500 milliseconds you'll notice sometimes when you press the button in your garage if you have to press it a little bit longer than just a a tap like that well you might need a little bit longer of a pulse for the garage door to recognize or the controller to recognize that it's time to move now if you have to keep those contacts on in order to keep the garage door moving let's say open or closed then you would need to use the dry contact on off mode that's about it for this now I have a working garage door in my dual relay module T2 every time I tap that button or I use a voice assistant or any other system I can open and close my garage door remotely the final installation I will be doing today is a little bit abstract so we've kind of been working to this but it's almost impossible to cover everything that you'll run into I will tell you that this is a very simplistic situation that I ran into and yours could be more difficult but this could help you to wire in a number of appliances that have a switch associated with them I'm using a light bulb for this demonstration but it has a little switch on it so although this will use a lot of the same knowledge that we've developed over this video you should learn that things like this aren't that complex this is a bit of a discovery product project and honestly you're going to run into this a lot now this is a very simple switch we have here on and off just turns on and off any light bulb we're going to go into this and this is where we don't know actually what's going on inside of this switch if you don't want the physical switch anymore you're going to cut around it and then we're going to connect it to the aara uh device there but if you want to keep the switch in line you have to make a decision do you want this ahead of the physical switch so this is where my my power cable is going you can see it right there do I want it in front of that so that would mean that the relay is always powered which I think is what you're going to want to do in a lot of cases and then you can still control manually physically through this switch now the other option is down stream of that so you could kill the power to the relay without unplugging but you know the third option is to actually get into this see what the switch is made of and integrate it into this device that would be through using the bottom three ports in here and we have to discover what's going on inside of here so I'm going to open this up and we're going to get into it now obviously First Step hold the power power this is it's going to be hard to read a little bit but right there iix it this is from an iix IT kit that I bought they have all kinds of little plastic tools that help you to get into little compartments like this they also have these cards they have this now I've opened this up a little bit but just you know find whatever little Gap you can get one of these little tools worked into there and then you're just you're just kind of getting it started that should allow you to then move along and continue the process as you go you just got to get in there you go so now I have opened this up and the point of opening up this switch was to understand what's going on inside of it and how we could use it in conjunction with this and I think when I look at this number one you see the blue line is just bypassing this switch we can also see physically this way this direction is closing the contact I'll try and open it here and then you'll notice that it's kind of popped up the blue line going straight through that's our neutral okay so that's how we know now what our neutral is and what our line or our hot is the brown and then eventually our load is this now for me I'm going to install the relay where it always has power and the reason for that is I don't need a physical switch to turn off my relay I want this powered all the time so we're going to cut Upstream of the wireless switch and I'm going to give myself some good space now I'm using tin snips okay guys some people are going to get a little bit upset about that but too bad now I have this ready to go and there I can see my two cables now I've got to strip these down so I've stripped down all of my CA I've actually done quite a bit here now this brown wire is going to the switch the physical switch and then that goes all the way to the light bulb now the next piece and you can see I've stripped I've broken out the outer jacket that's what You' call and I was able to get ratings for the cable off of this okay so I broke down the outer jacket I just wire stripped using these and then I wi stripped the inner jacket and then these are threaded cables so I did tie them or twist them together that's usually good you notice they're a little bit different length that's because I'm anticipating how I'm wiring this now from the wall this is my entire cable there I'll make a nice heart for you um now you can see I've got the blue cable might have to strip back this outer jacket a little bit more and I might have to twist these together a little bit more but you can see I have uh stripped those I've also grabbed the same cable so I think we can kind of tell what's going together here all of our blue cables are going to come together and then one of these is going to go into the neutral for the relay and then the brown when we're coming from the wall that is what we would call our hot our line so that right there that piece is going into here and then this brown one that's going to the switch this is the load side so this is L1 or L2 you can make that determination but that's where L1 is going into now we're ready so this is my cable that's going into the wall all right it's my plugin obviously I'm not plugged in as I do this and our L is going our Brown is going into l so with this one because this cable is fairly small do have to really pay attention to how this is sitting in there we need screw to hold down try and hold it in the middle and we're not just tying this into the neutral that that's not going to work for us we need to tie all the neutrals together now from the switch side I have to do the same thing with the brown conductor but I'm going to go into L1 and I'm just I'm just checking I'm making sure things aren't going to pull out but I'm not pulling too hard cuz this is threaded cable it's very small cable now I'm going to take my third set of cables which are my neutrals okay one two and we're going to use three and really we're just going to tie these together so we want to get them as lined up as we can I'm going to use a wire nut for this I could use a waggo connector get them all in there hold it right here and start to twist until you feel them starting to turn on themselves and you have a good strong connection now this connector just has to go in here got a little bit too much exposed conductor so I'm just going to cut that now it's not beautiful don't get me wrong this is not a beautiful look so you're going to have to think about how you're going to enclose this and how you're going to hide the box that you're going to enclose this in cuz I would recommend that you do enclose it look I've got little wires exposed little things like that you don't want anyone touching that stuff so our wireless switch is not turning on the device because our our relay has not allowed the power off so what we have now is a double uh control Point here for our light but this can help you kill things like phantom power into devices so I could leave this plugged in the only phantom power is coming from my relay now of course I have nothing plugged in to the second contact so nothing's going to happen when I turn that one off but when I turn that one off there you go that turns it on and off and I'll be able to get power readouts from how much is being consumed by this load with that if I had wanted to wire in the physical switch then I would need to solder on or connect another cable onto the two sides of the switch I would then take those cables into the S1 and C ports of my relay with those two wires and it would act a lot like like the light switch scenario except I think in a lot of cases you're going to want to cut out that physical switch and then have it act just like the light switch where it's not really connected to anything else that way as you're flicking that switch back and forth It's just being recognized on the S1 and comp ports you might end up just buying a whole new Switch so I currently have this relay wired in and it is controlling two individual devices so on the left it is controlling or on the right sorry this switch is controlling right here you you see I just turned that off I can turn it back on uh and that will come back on and I can turn off this individually and that goes on and off okay so we have two devices wired up they are currently both on but I'm going to turn off the bulb just so that we have a difference so this switch one is on this switch off is two now when we go into the device settings we have some additional options so the power off memory you have four options for remember last state uh always on after power is restored always off and reverse the last state now I think a lot of these are very self-explanatory but if I turn off the power to this whole setup and because I have it set in remember last state and I turn that that power back on this one should come back on and this one should not and it has done that perfectly you can see this came back online and we're good to go the other thing that you will need every time is whether the device is in wet contact mode uh dry contact pulse mode so that just pushes through a single pulse electrically or an onoff okay and so so in the dry contact mode you see this little red jumper wire uh the dry contact mode will always have no jumper wire in it now these other things these other three settings are a little bit different so the switch type these are the different types of switches or sensors that you can connect to the switch ports okay S1 S2 and Comm or common uh if you have a loer type switch up and down or is it a button type or do you want to disable the whole thing but I don't have anything connected so that doesn't really matter right now uh do you want to convert this to a wireless switch so what this means is if you have a switch a physical switch tied in on this and you convert to a wireless switch that physical switch will no longer work so you have to think about whether you want want to do that I don't know a lot of cases where you would want that uh there's maybe a few maybe you want to disable your garage door controller something like that not allow it to do things now interlock mode is in a lot of cases going to be used uh for motors for bir directional Motors so this is not something you're going to use a lot of the time personally but it can help you know with electric Machinery devices Motors in most cases uh it can stop you from instantly applying voltage to both sides and damaging your motor most smart relays are going to connect best with their own application but lots of us want to use those other voice assistants and those other systems to control our home now since this one specifically is a zigby device you could potentially connect it to other zigg hubs but you've seen the settings that this device has access to and you've seen that they're really important for how it works and those are only available in the aara app today you're going to find that with most smart relays and because they are that technical device you're probably not going to find a good fit within another system to manage those settings so you're going to want to connect the smart relay to the app from the manufacturer but after that you can connect smart relays to most of the larger types of home automation apps Amazon Google Apple and Samsung apps are all able to integrate with most brands I won't walk you through the method for integrating with those companies because it's relatively simple but here's a quick breakdown now with Amazon you can add the aara skill in their skill store with Google you add a device and then you connect it to your aara account again with Apple you integrate your aara Hub with apple and it brings all the devices connected to it and with Samsung smart things you can use aar's matter Bridge feature to add a matter device and then choose to add your Hub it will then act a lot like apple homekit and bring in all the devices attached to that Hub then those systems will be able to control the two relays in this dual relay module and with most relays all you're going to get is a single control point for the Relay one of the only options you will have in those other systems is to turn on and off the relay and to do so through automations in those systems there's really very little other control so just understand with relays that the primary application is going to be where you'll set all the settings and most of those apps like the acara app have a very robust automation system themselves but you'll be able to create automations to control relays like the rest of your smart home in those other apps and one thing that I have found fairly useful with relays is to change the device type in those other applications you can usually select light or switch or plug and that often describes the device well enough that you get the right controls with things like voice assistance so for example I changed one of the relays to a light in the Amazon app and that means when I ask for all the lights to turn on that it turns on that relay there can be drawbacks to that and for example with the garage door setup you are likely to be restricted on opening and closing that garage door if you set that as the type in an application that's because it becomes a security device so just watch out when you're changing the device type that you might have to change it back to get the features you want this is where you're going to need a more advanced guide or at least some additional examples I'll link a really great video down below in the description that Rob over at the hookup did on his channel it'll give you a few more scenarios with relays but he was specifically dealing with one brand you'll have to watch out for the differences but it still should really take your knowledge to another level because you'll be hearing a lot of the same things that I said today with a slightly different set of relays and a few different scenarios otherwise the links are down below for aar's dual relay module T2 it's a fantastic relay and it's going to do just about everything you need the other thing that I think I can really help you with are putting this type of a device into the best automations that you can possibly make in your smart home now there's a video up on screen right now that will help you expand the types and the level of automations you can create today so check that out otherwise thanks for watching today and of course don't hate automate

Channel: Automate Your Life

Views: 79,438

Keywords: home automation, smart home, smart relay, smart relays, smart home relay, tutorial smart relay, smart home automation, home automation ideas, smart home setup, matter smart home, affordable homekit, smart home 101, smart home explained 101, how to use smart relays, smart home ideas, smart home project, cheap smart home, luxury smart home, smart home problems, alexa, smart home beginner’s guide, automate your life, aqara, amazon alexa, smart relay switch, smart switch

Id: 5WXymS_6Ae0

Length: 82min 54sec (4974 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 10 2023