How does RA2 connect to things like patio lights, garden lights, xmas etc?

Just had one more question with RA2 as I'm buying a new home so looking at the best options. Right now my condo has all Insteon which I like as I like how the keypads can have scenes and what not on them directly and don't need an internet connected controller to work. My current house has gone from HomeSeer to Insteon with the ISY, to Caseta to SmartThings with Z-Wave, etc, so kind of a hybrid of everything.

I'm considering RA2 for our new home but when looking at all the devices on the Lutron website, I don't really see much for outdoors. I have path lights that plug into a wall outlet, as well as outdoor flood or spotlights, etc that all plug into the wall. I saw an appliance module but it says for indoor use only, and didn't see any for outdoors. Most of my lighting scenes outdoors will include a lot of extra lights, like pool lights, spots, path lights and so on so I'd really want them to turn on when a RA2 scene is run as well. I mean I'm sure I could build a shed or unit for the outdoors that's insulated and then run all the cabling in there to connect, or the garage etc, but just wondering if there's something more official or designed for the task. It's making it hard to consider RA2 over Insteon or Z-Wave when there's so many devices made for those systems that do exactly this. Thanks!

There is nothing officially approved for outdoor use. If you want to use RR2 stuff, then switches inside the house to control outside loads is probably the only official option. You could also consider using the outputs from a VCRX to control relays or some other system for outdoor lights, but that is kind of kludgy. A third option would be to use zwave or other third party controls for outdoor lights and then run an automation layer on top of RR2 - something like Indigo or CQC for DIY.

That works. I wasn't sure how reliable RA2 was under Indigo but was thinking of that already. That way I could just use Z-Wave for the outdoors as well as integrate with Hue like I was looking at while still using RA2.

The RR2 plugin for indigo is very solid - RR2 has a very robust API, and the plugin can see pretty much every event basically in real time - button presses, dimming, motion, events, etc. The biggest lag will be in controlling the z-wave loads, but that's just an inherent weakness in z-wave. For turning off outdoor scenes, that won't be a big deal, but you definitely want to stick with RR2 for interior loads - it looks very nice when all lights in a room dim up/down, etc at the same time.