Question/Advice on which generic driver to use for both wall mount and plug-in outlets.
For example, I recently noticed differences in the generic Zigbee drivers I can chose for my wall mounted and plug-in Zigbee outlets. If I use the switch driver, it doesn't register power. If I use the outlet driver, I get the power feature back but can't use the Device Watchdog Activity report as apparently, that driver doesn't support or report that function... For basic control on and off, both drivers work great... I guess what I'm asking is there something behind the scenes I should be concerned with?
Same question for my Z-Wave outlets. All of them, both wall mounted and plug-in are Z-Wave Plus. There is a generic "Smart" Z-Wave Switch driver but no generic "Smart" Z-Wave outlet driver. If I use the outlet driver, does it lose some functionality of the plus device or cause it to need polling? If I use the "Smart" switch driver, am I missing out on an outlet feature?
Bumping this to see if I get any feedback... What drivers should I be using? This is only for the wall mounted and plugin Z-Wave/Zigbee devices... Should it be a switch or an outlet or does it not matter?
Tagging @mike.maxwell since he probably wrote all of these drivers and can tell you what the difference is between them. For the Zigbee ones, I don't know besides possibly power metering configuration.
For Z-Wave, there is no "regular" versus "smart" outlet driver because, unlike switches/dimmers, I don't think there were ever any Z-Wave outlets that didn't report status back to the hub from physical changes as they happened. (That was the issue with switches; many manufacturers didn't license the since-expired patent.)
For Device Watchdog, what it looks at for activity is the "Last Activity At" time under "Device Details" on the device page. Often this corresponds to device events (check the "Events" button on the device page), which for a switch may not be anything unless you turn it on or off. If it reports power, that could possibly generate events in besides on/off times and may explain the difference you see. In any case, you'd need to match your threshold in that app with the frequency of activity you generally see (or expect) from the device. Personally, I never found much value in trying to monitor powered devices like this (but it's great for sensors).
Thanks for the info. I use Device Watchdog to routinely check the connection to my devices. I have a lot of devices and sometimes one will fall off if it isn't used regularly. DW helps me keep everything in line. Every switch and almost all of my outlets are z-wave and/or zigbee. Many of them are not used all the time...
My understanding is I set a 24 hour window in DW and any devices that haven't checked in during that time frame, get a refresh request. If a device isn't communicating, I can easily see that.
When I switched over to the zigbee outlet driver from using the switch driver, this no longer works. So I am assuming there is no refresh capability or whatever the command is that DW uses...
