Are these good plugs to buy?

So far as a new Hubitat owner I've mostly invested in various zigbee bulbs,and couple peanut plugs and one smart things button. Trying to not waste any money on bad products in the future so thought I'd get some info on these z-wave plugs.

Love aeotec.. Never had any problems with their devices

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They're not bad, but that's about the most expensive Z-Wave plug you can find for, in my opinion, no good reason. Zooz has a few for less (including one that can handle heavy motor loads), and if you prefer Zigbee, the 2018 ST plug is less even at full price.

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Is this for smart plug purpose or repeater purposes?
I can say that if your looking for a repeater the expectation I had was blown away by the aeotec range extender 6. Far better than any normal wall plug or in wall plug or switch I have used. It takes up a socket space in the wall, but if your attempting to improve connectivity their hands down a superior option to a plug or switch.

Or... you could get the best of both worlds... Iris 3210-L Zigbee outlets with a built in Z-Wave Plus repeater... can’t beat the price on these from a very reliable ebay seller.

And if you want motion sensors, these are great little sensors.

These devices were all made by Centralite for Lowe’s Iris, regarded as one of the best Zigbee device manufacturers.

Check out this ebay seller’s store for more liquidated Iris devices, like water sensors, contact sensors, etc... I would avoid buying Iris v1 devices, as those were proprietary to Iris. While Hubitat has added support for some Iris v1 devices, I would never recommend buying them when the v2 and v3 devices are available. Both the Irisi v2 and v3 devices are fully Zigbee HA1.2 compliant, and this can be used on many platforms.

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@ogiewon yea.. I have several of these ... Cheap and convenient that they are zigbee and z-wave repeaters.. Makes for a strong mesh on both sides

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Use this driver for the z-wave side...

Gives you a lot more information

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That seller is fantastic. I've purchased many iitems from him,all great, no issues.
Highly recommended

Do those plugs have energy monitoring? Or are they just simple on/off?

The Iris 3210-L outlets support power monitoring.

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I never got the Zwave side to work correctly. Always dropped on me so I gave up re-pairing it. The Zigbee side is rock solid.

Doesn't support Power Management though... Otherwise it would be a complete driver.

What’s the reason for considering this plug? Sounds like you’re primarily or totally Zigbee right now.

I’m mostly Zigbee but I have some other proprietary stuff in there. I have a few Z-Wave devices too, but other than my door lock, the reason for adding Z-Wave devices to my hub was because there wasn’t a Zigbee version available of these particular devices. But with a peanut plug, you already have power control and power monitoring. So why the Z-Wave plug?

One thing to understand before you go too deep into Z-Wave. If a Zigbee device drops off the network, or needs to be re-paired to the hub, you can just put the device into paring mode, then put the hub into discovery mode, and the device will rejoin the hub without messing up your automations.

With Z-Wave, if the sane thing needs to be done, you have to put the hub and device into Exclusion mode. That removes the device from the hub and breaks all your automations you’ve previously setup that included the Z-Wave device. So then after re-joining the Z-Wave device to the hub, you have to manually fix all your automations that that Z-Wave device was included in.

It’s one of the disadvantages of Z-Wave versus Zigbee, and for me it’s a pretty large disadvantage.

Technically, Z-Wave requires a "Replace" function, where one node (device) in the network can be replaces with another--say, if you swap one with an identical-ish one (or re-pair the same existing device, though that's not really the intent of the feature as I understand it). This is required for certification. Hubitat is not certified*, but if they ever decide to, they'll have to implement this for Z-Wave, which will lessen the problem. Perhaps they'll do it on their own some day anyway (something that isn't Z-Wave-specific would actually better in my opinion). I can dream. :slight_smile: In the meantime, if you use an external Z-Stick, third-party tools could do this (EDIT: I have used a secondary Z-Wave stick to do this since writing this post, and it works, so you don't even need to use an external stick for the hub itself).

But yes, Zigbee is definitely easier here, especially with the way things are now.

*EDIT: I saw someone "like" this post recently, so I came back to edit it and say: the C-7 now does have the "Replace" functionality built in for Z-Wave. :slight_smile: (Still not certified as far as I can see, but the most reasonable assumption to make is that they are working on things to head in that direction.)

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Good to know. Thanks