I purchased a bunch of Zooz Dimmers, Switches, and Fan Controllers a couple years ago, and recently moved to a new home. I brought them with me. I also purchased about 20 more of a combination of those. Since having installed the old and some of the new ones, I have had 5 dimmer failures (3 old, 2 new) and 2 switch failures, both old.
I still have about 10 in boxes, which I am planning to return.
I am looking for recommendations, the most important things in order of priority for me are:
Reliability - does not fail and need replacing
Speed
Does not miss commands - I've seen some hit and miss with hubs controlling the Zooz devices, such as when the on message is sent, the switch does not turn on, but it does the next time.
Local
I would like to stay as far under $75 each as possible
I do not have a Z-Wave, Zigbee, WiFi, or proprietary (from their hub) wireless preference.
Requiring the manufacture's hub is okay if the performance improvement / advantages are enough.
I haven't heard of extreme reliability issues with any of the major brands, including Zooz, though I have heard of old GE/Jasco switches or dimmers eventually dying with the "click of death." I'm not sure about their newer ones--or that lots of these have really been on the market long enough to tell yet. Normally I wouldn't hesitate to recommend any of them: Zooz, Inovelli, GE/Jasco/Honeywell, HomeSeer ... but I see your experience suggests otherwise and may make you not want to.
Around here, the usual king of reliablity when you ask is Lutron. Their products are a bit more expensive than most (Caseta is still reasonable for many products and in line with some of the more expensive Z-Wave and Zigbee options, and many are under $75 USD). It does require their bridge in order to integrate with Hubitat (in the case of Caseta, this would be the Smart Bridge Pro, L-BRGPRO2; the non-Pro Bridge cannot integrate; for RA2, this would be at least a Main Repeater, but you'd be hard-pressed to find most RA2 dimmers/switches for under your desired price).
I know you said you don't have any protocol preference, but these are a proprietary protocol, ClearConnect, in case that matters for other reasons--it won't help you build a Z-Wave or Zigbee mesh on Hubitat, for example. If that matters, there are a lot of Z-Wave options (any I mentioned before) but only a few current Zigbee ones I know of (the GE/Jasco switch and dimmer, if any are even still in stock). Inovelli is supposed to be coming out with a Zigbee line, Blue Series, similar to their Red Series Z-Wave line in the future, though that won't help you at the moment (and it's obviously way too soon to speculate on reliability). Zooz also has new 700-series Z-Wave products that may work better than the 500-series ones I'm assuming you have. I'm not aware of anyone heartily recommending most Wi-Fi switches/dimmers around here, but I suppose there are the Shelley modules if you wanted--as well as a few in-line Z-Wave (and maybe Zigbee? RGBGenie?) switches/dimmers, many of which let you couple them with any "real"/dumb switch you want, which some people prefer for aesthetic reasons. Aeon makes one of these (Z-Wave), and they have a pretty good reputation, though IMHO I'm not sure they deserve it, at least at their typical prices.
Just some of my thoughts! I'm sure you'll get a lot more.
I did more research and was excited about the Caseta products. Short lived though. The hub is no longer in production and few places you can get a new one. Stepping back to consider whether I want to buy an obsolete product in order to integrate to Hubitat.
Do you know if there are any plans to integrate with their current hub?
Where did you see that? The Caseta Pro Bridge V2 is still a current product far as I am aware. The V1 was discontinued a couple years ago, and you can't find those, but the V2 is readily available.
Thanks for letting me know. I could not find it on the Caseta site, Best Buy site says no longer available in new condition, Amazon had a long lead time from a third party seller. Looking at the link you sent on Amazon, in stock and here by Thursday. I just ordered. Thanks!!
I have a few Inovellis (both red and black, all dimmers), A few GE/Jasco switches, one Zooz double switch, and recently started down the Lutron path. Other then the Lutron's they are all Z-wave.
In my experience I haven't had trouble with any of them with one exception. A single Inovelli black series dimmer just completely died recently. It was under warranty and they quickly sent me a return label, I shipped it off a couple days ago and am currently waiting to get a replacement
But other than that everything has pretty much worked perfectly as far as I can tell.
I like the Inovellis for the LED strip. But I am beginning to lean towards Lutron the most. They are completely reliable and respond very fast. My one complaint with them is I would like to be able to change the off behavior from the switch to turn off instantly, instead of fading off. Minor issue though.
In short, for me at least, anything from a reputable company has been pretty solid.
How are the zooz and ge enbrightens at dimming? I've got a house full of Inovelli's and it bugs me that they cannot do a slow fade off without it looking like a series of step downs. I'm ready to start upgrading my home theater but a very smooth and slow fade off is a requirement for that room.
The only GE I have that is a dimmer is this no neutral one. In short. it's probably no good for what you need. Not only doesn't it dim in a nice fade, it doesn't even really do it in slow steps either. More like a random flicker. It works, but not great. I only got it because I needed a cheap no-neutral dimmer.
The Zooz that dims isn't completely smooth, but it probably does better than the innovelli, but probably not by a huge amount,
