I've been using Sengled Zigbee plugs to monitor appliances, and everything is working great with the 4 plugs I have. I'm looking to add about a dozen more, and that makes me concerned about overloading the mesh. Those Sengleds are quite chatty: each plug sends a message every 5 seconds when the load is detected. That's fine for things that are not being used most of the time, but I imagine it might be an issue for things like TVs and receivers that stay on for many hours.
Are there any guidelines, how many is too many, without finding out the hard way?
I've been looking into the alternatives as a backup plan, and it doesn't look like there are a lot: it's either the oft-recommended Zooz Zen15 (Z-Wave), that just works and configured with a simple threshold report shouldn't flood the mesh, but at $35 a piece it does add up; or venturing into the Wi-Fi territory with either Kasa KP125 or Tasmota on Sonoff S31 or something like that; but that would require regularly polling the devices all the time, so that would be an additional constant load on the hub.
What's the general consensus these days? Thanks in advance!
I don't think there is any number officially or otherwise for how many devices is "too much". This seems to be very individual to your hub.
In my opinion, Zwave seems to have more noticible slowdowns with excessive power reports, it seems to overwhelm the hub or mesh more rapidly than Zigbee. Although maybe this effect is more often noticed because fewer of us use Zigbee power reporting?
There are a few things you can do no matter what device to cause the least issues.
Turn off any reports you don't need. Almost nobody cares or needs to know the bedroom light power draw. If you are trying to see if the light is on, the smart switch already knows it is on, power is redundant.
Tune the reporting. It doesn't make sense to have 1W power reports for your washer that draws hundreds of Watts. You can go much higher like a 100W change and still get useful data.
Similarly, you really don't need Watts change, AND Watts percentage change, AND time based reporting AND Volts and other reports. Some of these plugs have 5-6 separate reports! Turn off everything you don't need.
Be sure the device (if Zwave) can be paired NOT S0. Security S0 (triple traffic) plus 5-6 poorly tuned reports is going to murder the Zwave network.
I suggest staying away from Z-Wave devices that report power. Too many chatty devices can make your network sluggish. I had 10 Zigbee outlets, and didn't have any problems. However, as many others can attest, Wi-Fi devices are best for power reporting. I switched my power reporting to Kasa KP125 and they work great, all 15 of them
I agree with @bobbyD and @neonturbo. For power reporting WiFi >> Zigbee >> Z-wave. I have 6 zigbee power reporting outlets, 2 z-wave power reporting outlets and 10 Kasa KP-125 outlets.
Kasa's work great with @djgutheinz's community integration available here:
Yep, power reporting can be turned off completely (I think it's actually disabled by default), but it kind of defeats the purpose for me - I already have quite a few regular plugs, a mix of mostly Kasa HS103 (dirt cheap, and @djgutheinz 's integration is simply flawless) and Sonoff S31 (Zigbee flavor) in places where I don't need monitoring. I was curious, at what kind of scale does power reporting becomes problematic.
The general consensus seems to be that Wi-Fi is the safest bet, which makes perfect sense, so that's the direction I'm going to take.
Thanks everyone!!!
I have 10 Zigbee Iris v2 Smart Plugs that constantly report power. I mostly use them as repeaters (along with 4 Ikea plugs), but I do use the power reports to know when the dishwasher, clothes washer, and dryer are done. I've also got about 80 Iris v2 contact and motion sensors in the mesh, with about 3/4 of those reporting temperature (I've temp reporting turned off on a few). My Zigbee mesh seems to be rock solid in performance. I never notice a delayed response from any of the motion or contacts.
Pardon the quick ignorance, no, it's really long lasting
I have stayed clear of WiFi as HE doesn't have that radio.
What is the logical path for connecting a WiFi device?
The new device is setup with your access point, you assign a static IP and then the driver in HE is pointed to that static for traffic?
@dnickel You are pretty much spot-on!
Kasa products are a bit of a special case, because they have a well-known local API that doesn't require going through the cloud. So, yeah, you give your WiFi devices static IPs and then run a discovery through the Kasa integration app in HE, which will create corresponding devices, and you can configure polling interval (since the device cannot really push the data directly to HE, it needs to be polled).
I have all IoT devices on a separate VLAN, and the IP range where plugs sit is additionally blocked from accessing the internet. That, obviously, caused them to lose the cloud access through TP-Link's own Kasa app, but I do not consider that a problem, as they are controlled by HE exclusively.
When I started getting into the whole "smart home" thing 6+ years ago with smartthings, I went full Z-Wave, and it took me a while to realize that having a mix of different technologies, playing to their respective strengths, is a much better approach. Now I have a 50/50 mix of Z-Wave and Zigbee, with a few WiFi devices here and there, and it looks like the WiFi share is going to get larger
Depends on the WiFi device and the integration. Some of them - like LiFX bulbs are picked up based on MAC address. So the device doesn't need a fixed IP address.
Also, at least for me, the WiFi devices that are not appealing are those that don't offer a locally accessible API. I like the ones that can be accessed locally - because my mesh network can handle it, and they remain very responsive.
Hubitat has an Ethernet connection to your LAN, so it doesn’t matter whether other IP devices are wired or WiFi. If it has an IP address and a Hubitat driver, the hub can communicate with it.
This is a common misconception which trips up many new users. Hubitat connects to your home's local area network (LAN) via a hardwired Ethernet connection. Once connected, Hubitat can communicate with all other devices connected to your LAN, as well as to Internet based (Cloud) systems. "WiFi" is simply another technology to connect a device wirelessly to your home LAN. Thus, once devices are connected to you home's network, they can communicate with each other.
Hubitat's early focus was primarily on Zigbee, Z-Wave and a few LAN connected devices that did not require any cloud connectivity. Local Processing has always been prioritized when possible. For example, Hubitat has always been able to connect over the LAN to Lutron lighting controllers and the Philips Hue bridge. Yeelights were added later, and very recently LIFX support was implemented. All of these use local area network communications, without and reliance on the Internet/Cloud.
In some other cases, the cloud is unavoidable and Hubitat has integrated with systems like Ecobee thermostats via a cloud integration. Amazon Echo and Google Home are also cloud based solutions.
Thanks guys.
One other thing I note is that when searching for these devices everything seems to call them HS103 so one is just Kasa and one the affiliated Tp-Link?
TP-Link is the manufacturer. Kasa is the product line. HS103 is one specific model that works with this integration. It is an older model. The ones I use are KP125.
For some things like power monitoring, because the WiFi data transfer rate (even old-fashioned 802.11b is 11 mbps) is so much greater than zigbee (max 250 kbps) or z-wave (max 100 kbps), it is more difficult to slow the hub (or mesh down) by data saturation. So if you have a good WiFi network, LIFX bulbs and Kasa power-monitoring plugs are a good idea.
Wifi is simply a way to connect to your lan. That said, the reason to shy away from wifi devices for IoT is because the majority use cloud access. There are exceptions such as Lifx, Leaf, Shelley, Kasa, and a few others who's api allow for 100% local control. This is desirable.
