Cheapest ones that I've ever found are the Xiaomi sensors. However, it appears that you have to be just a bit more careful in their setup. I found that putting an Ikea Tradfri repeater on each floor of my house, was the ticket for correct repeating. Also, you have to use the community drivers that have been set up by @veeceeoh (who has done an amazing job).
Water leak sensors:
I purchased a few of the Ikea Tradfri outlets to build out my zigbee network. I think I covered the house pretty well, but is there a way to check the mesh network to make sure they are all connected and have good signals?
My experience is the opposite. My zigbee devices have an extremely low reliability and a severe delay a good percentage of the time when they actually respond. Their range is very limited in my home (about 15 feet with no walls in between). On the other hand, my Z-Wave devices have NEVER given me any reliability issue. Always snappy and instantaneous. If I save a new automation it works instantly, any zigbee automations seem to take time to “propogate”(?) for some reason. Mixed automations (utilizing both Z-Wave and zigbee devices) have proven this to me when the Z-Wave devices respond instantly upon saving new automations where the zigbee device can take a few (and more often than not, SEVERAL)try’s after saving it.
My zigbee devices were not very reliable until I added Tradfri outlets (5), Samsung outlets (2), and Securifi Peanut outlets (4). This is for a small (2000 sq ft) 2-storey townhouse. I placed the Tradfri outlets to be close to Xiaomi sensors.
After pairing these to HE, I shutdown the hub for ~30 minutes to force the zigbee mesh to "self-heal", and then powered the hub back.
I only have 6 zigbee devices. In 1 room. All about 10 feet apart at the most. 2 are the new ST buttons. And those are extremely Unreliable. They work at first for about an hour. Then they stop being reliable. I fight them every time. Click.... nothing.... wait... 3...2...1... nothing, click again... nothing.... wait... 3...2...1... try again, Click. Lights turn ON.OFF...ONOFF. Very dissatisfying reliability.
Great question. As a point of interest, I have a dozen or more zigbee devices including the notoriously flaky HBFCs, and a boatload of Samsung buttons, and my Zigbee is as reliable as my Zwave for sure. But I added Peanuts, Samsung Plugs and a pair of Honeywell/Jasco ZIgbee light switches to make sure my mesh was STRONG!
Your first two paragraphs exactly mirror my findings after 5 years of spending way too much cash and time on home automation. I really wish I had read this back in 2014!!
I can understand your frustration with those ST Button devices, as others have reported issues with those as well. Seems to be a problem with those particular Samsung devices.
Please don’t judge Zigbee based on the performance of those two devices. Some have found updating the firmware of these via a ST hub has helped.
I have been using SmartThings for about three years.
maybe it is where I live (near a telephone exchange that has a large area WiFi network)
maybe it is because I have a full ubiquiti WiFi network of my own
but many times I have tried Zigbee, many many times.
every time, I have given up with their spotty unreliable performance!
all my lights now are Lifx and Yeelight
I have long since given up worrying about what the interwebs know about me!
yeelight 97% reliable Lifx 70% reliable.
everything else is zWave or wifi
how this plays out when my hubitat arrives, we will see.. but NO more zigbee for me!
it's been horrible horrible horrible!
Hue? reset twice a week
Aerotec never fully supported battery life crap
ST sensors.. all gave up within a couple of months of buying
ST outlets?
I only bought 2 thank god, neither of them lasted more than a month
HA really isn't for you, if you can't live with unreliability!
my zWave stuff (even the really ancient stuff is 99%+ reliable, I don't get the complaints about it being difficult to pair, you only have to do it once (ever) zigbee? no thanks sick to death of resetting bulbs
in passing, Orvibo pir's work great (for two days) then never work again (thats what I get for buying more zigbee stuff
Fibaro sensors seem to have been the most reliable zigbee devices
harmony hub? reliable, but a pain in the bum
google and amazon voice assistants? both equally flaky, but google's is much more useful
Nest V Ring doorbell? maybe because I am in the UK.. by the time the internal ringer for ring, rang the post man was delivering in the next town!
I Look forward to my next chapter, and Hubitat
but I do, in the certain knowledge that zigbee won't be involved!
in passing, my move to Hubitat, is because of the ongoing reliability issues with SmartThings. it is a real shame, because the community is FANTASTIC!
they have been let down by Samsung.
I am still trying to find my way round here.
I haven't yet come across an easy way to find DHs & intergrations.. but I have only been in a couple of times!
Love and Peace Guy's n Gal's
Given this thread, I am in the process of replacing 8 monprice z-wave 4-in-1 sensors with NYCE zigbee motion sensors for better battery life and hopefully better response time. I ordered some Trådfri outlets to use solely as repeaters. Given the repeaters are dependent on active house AC voltage, does anybody have experience measuring the time required to reconstruct the zigbee network after a house power failure?
Many parameters of the network configuration (including the channel number in use and the repeater's child table entries) are stored in non-volatile memory; this data survives power outages, so the network doesn't need to be reconstructed when power is restored. So theoretically the network should not take a long time to return to normal operation after a power outage.
However in some scenarios (like when some repeaters regain power after others have already been powered up), their child devices may assume they have been orphaned and try to find new parents. When the original parent router resumes operation, its child table is now out of sync with the current state of the network. As a result some amount of time is necessary (could be 5 minutes or so before the old child entry ages out of the original parents' table) for the new configuration to stabilize and normal routing resumes.
At least that's how the theory says it should work. Sometimes in practice (especially in the early SmartThings days) parts of the network never seemed to get back in sync after an outage. I would often wind up pulling batteries on an unresponsive device to get it back on to the network...
