At work we have a few rooms that have 4 buttons organized in what normally is one light switch. Each button controls different parts of the rooms. I call them Heisenbuttons, you never know what they'll do until you've pressed them.

Tried operating them with your eyes closed? Real Heisenbuttons change their behaviour depending on whether or not they're being observed.

The upside to wireless switches are how cheap they to install and remove.

I'm in a 40 year old apartment with a lot of switches that now affect nothing, because they broke and no one fixed the wires ('cause landlords are cheap). I wouldn't want to change this for a bunch of wireless switches but it's easy to imagine landlords of the future wanting nothing but glue on fixtures - routing wires costs significant money.

Are you saying the switch is broken? Those can be replaced in about 15 mins and cost very little. The wires in wall rarely break and if do that could be a very dangerous situation.

There are switches that literally don't go any fixture or outlets at all, there's not even a visible sign of a fixture being removed. I assume the fixture was removed sometime during buildings life.

Waiting for “yeah there is a circuit that trips the breaker even with nothing plugged in”

These kinds of switches are perfectly analogous to technical debt. Doing things the right/straightforward way involves costs that we don’t want to pay (holes in the wall/labour to run a new circuit) so we shoehorn a complex hack using some new tech (RF control). The cost savings are moderate and the price paid is amortized over every further use of the system.

A few years down the road, the radio switch transmitter breaks down and is no longer manufactured. The receivers, wires and the mechanical switches blocked in the ON position are hidden somewhere under multiple layers of drywall.

But the functionality of the switch can be emulated with with a software defined radio attached to a 1GHz Raspberry Pi running Linux. It works great, but an out of date kernel enables a virus that spreads from light-switch to light switch and performs a light show on the evening of 4th of July in any calendar year.

Wouldn’t the switches just be placed in the boxes for the old switches? Burying a switch as you describe is against code in the US and I assume other countries.

He's taking the ball and running with it

also he seems to think that people put up multiple layers of drywall like it's wallpaper?

That sounds very frustrating, but I'd like to put my two cents in.

All our lights in our rented apartment are ikea TRÅDFRI smart lights, we have the ikea 5 button remote in a lot of the rooms and google home's spread around.

The whole system works with zigbee -> mqtt and home assistant and it took me a year to iron the bugs out. But generally it seldomly takes over half a second for the lights to respond to a command. If something breaks down it's almost always because I changed a config, not by itself. And it's really fun and nice to be able to make any button do any action by just editing an UI :) Or automate something we feel should happen by itself.

I like to think of it as it being a system that we can fit around our own lives and how we like things, instead of having to accept the situation as is (button is here and controls this light at this brightness). And it's not overly expensive either!

In terms of fixing the immediate problem you have, I wonder if maybe the frequency being used by the switch would be in the 2.4Ghz range and your WiFi using the same channel.

I don't know if that's possible with remote switches, but with zigbee there's overlap possible. (https://www.metageek.com/training/resources/zigbee-wifi-coex...)

Or maybe the batteries in the remote are running low?

And if you would like to also control that light using an app on your phone or voice commands if you use "Ok google": the Broadlink RM Pro could maybe allow you to control the light using an app.

I installed a wireless (RF) switch and I like it. It lights a tiny LED when it's on, and it is as reliable as a hardwired switch.

The big advantage is that it provides separate fan and light controls without needing to run new electrical wires through the wall and ceiling.

You are living in the little hell we created. Sorry.