I personally shy away from Zwave because there are so few devices out there supporting our frequency and our electrical standards. The only Zwave devices Iāve considered have been some Aeotec plugs and relays. The problem I would have had if I had used them would have been that all my mains powered devices (i.e mesh repeaters) would have been Zwave and all battery powered sensors would have been Zigbee. It would have given me a very flaky Zigbee mesh. Since Zigbee is using the same frequencies worldwide you have a much larger selection of Zigbee battery devices than you ever will Zwave. So thatās why Iām doubling down on Zigbee, not because thereās something wrong with Zwave or the Zwave devices available to us.
I have not used Nue switches myself, but Iāve seen some reports of flaky switches and glass panels falling off and hard to get after-sales support.
I have wired up a whole house with Ikuu. They are not as good as I was hoping they would be, and for dimmers there is only community drivers available (but they work well). Itās only the dimmers that are repeating with Ikuu, the switches donāt.
You can set them up in a 3-way configuration, but only the āmasterā switch would work to turn the lights on if the hub wouldnāt be available. The other switches in that circuit would only be used for controlling the master switch and that requires a hub in the background to do that logic.
The biggest grief Iāve had with them is that the Zigbee switches are all āno neutralā. That is a pain in the proverbial when it comes to the slave switches in a multi way circuit. Each of the slaves will have to have a load correction devices wired up to them to work. If they had just supported neutral, that wouldnāt have been a requirement.
Itās early days yet with no one living in that house yet to stress test the Ikuus, but once youāve worked around the quirks, they seem to work. And they are very cheap too.
Having by said all of that, if I were to go smart light switches again in the future, I would probably go down the PDL Wiser path, even though they are more (much more) expensive.
I can vouch for Aeotec also. I just recently finished building and put Aeotec dimmer (under the assumption that the provided LED can be dimmed which can't), Aeotec Nano and dual Nano behind my light switches.
Speed is really fast especially with Siri,
I have ST door sensors which are all zigbee devices which I combined with zigbee ST smart power plug as repeater. I had issues with battery draining so fast because it was on a channel that was too busy so I need to change my wifi to a different channel so maybe this is something to be considered.
I added Aqara door and motion sensors but couldn't get them to stay connected with Hubitat and they don't seem to like ST smart plugs. I had to buy a G3 camera which is also a hub and connect those sensors. I connect everything to home assistant (HA) which is my primary platform now for automation since I find it is easier to use and understand compare to Hubitat.
HA came pretty far on their user interface.
Zigbee is cheap, thatās purely why itās popular.
IMO Zigbee is far less reliable, both from an operational POV (not so much mains, but battery Zigbee is a challenge to get reliable), and from a device reliability pov.
Iāve tried the Nue brand and a few other cheap brands and they have very short life spans compared to Aeotec and Fibaro zwave products.
Other brands of Zigbee devices, like Aeotec (formerly Samsung), are very reliable but cost almost as much as zwave devices.
The big issue I had with Zigbee was finding a channel that was somewhat reliable for battery devices. I have a Zigbee security keypad and Zigbee thermostats. I used to have Zigbee modules in my Yale deadbolts but swapped them for zwave as the were very unreliable.
PS Zigbee battery life is also poor compared to zwave.
I agree.
I understand about the heavy cost upfront but I can definitely say it is worth the money fo the reliability and "just works" factor.
With most of my zigbee devices, we have to buy plenty of batteries so maybe even out in terms of $$$. Plus it can just drop while saying battery life is still good, which is not the case. Then I will be running around trying to find out why the automation failed, while the cause is only dead battery.
What battery life are you getting? I assume this is from coin batteries not 123s. Xiaomi and hue have excellent battery life - easily 12 months (more often 18+). Ikea/sonoff/Aotec (the old ST) - not so good unfortunately.
My Aeotec Tri-sensors get double the battery life of my Hue Sensors, plus the battery life on my Yale locks has improved greatly since replacing the Zigbee modules with z-wave modules.
The latter is the best apples to apples comparison as the actual hardware is identical, only the radio module was changed.
The Aotecs use a CR123a with about 1500mAh vs a hue internal sensor with AAAs of only about 900mAh and my xiaomi CR1632/CR2032 with 130/240 mAh respectively. So probably not a totally fair comp
In any case as you point out there is also the cost factor. It's just too expensive to go all zwave here for most of us.
Or there isnt an equiv z-wave device available for our region.
My rule is if it's wired directly to mains and inside a wall, it's z-wave. I dont trust most of the "built to the lowest possible cost" zigbee gear (there are likely some exceptions).
Iāve been in my current house for just over 3 years now. Just before we moved in, I installed Hue sensors in the whole house. At last count, Iāve got 18 of them. So far, I have only replaced the batteries in two of them. Your mileage will definitely vary depending on mesh health, radio interference and other variables.
guys does anyone know if there an advantage of zigbee vs zwave when dealing with bluestone walls ? I'm looking at switching to the ikea plugs to work as repeaters and managed power in the Museum as we can't get the Kasa switches anymore
a 3 hop limit would probably stop us, but I'm toying with upgrading my hubitat so the old one could go into the Museum as a second unit then I could start running zones
