The Situation: I am heading back to the southwest to live. I will be purchasing a home of recent enough construction (or new!) that neutrals in the j-boxes are virtually a sure thing.
One of my priorities is to run nothing but hardware that works natively with the Hubitat C-8pro that I already own. This means no hang-ons like Caseta or Philips Hue hubs; it's just more junk to have to fool with.
For in-wall devices like switches and receptacles my #1 requirement is screw terminals rather than wires that just add more clutter to the j-box and are hard to get back into place. For this and from the looks of the literature, I am zeroing in on Inovelli. It looks like a very nice product line and seems to do a lot of things I want to take advantage of. One example: if my garage door is open, the LED strip will turn a color letting me know to close it before a Karfen in the HOA rats me out, or just because I want the garage door closed.
What I seek: Your opinions based on experience with the product line, and which protocol you are using and why.
What I want to do at minimum: I would love to take advantage of the power monitoring abilities Inovelli offers. This is a biggie. Second is the feature where I can, say, have the pilot lights flash red while the garage door is open, or some other thing when something else triggers it.
Should I bother with Matter? Inovelli offers it and while the feature set is limited for the time being, updates are (allegedly) in the pipeline. I am a bit leery of Matter, having tried getting a Third Reality Matter / WiFi plug to set up. I found the instructions clear as mud and Third Reality won't answer questions.
Your thoughts and advice are eagerly awaited, and I thank you all in advance.
There's really only ever been one downside to Inovelli.. availability. There are of course, knock on effects to that shortage.. can they hang on through the dry times?
Personally I like Inovelli, and have their products in all of my switch/dimmer locations. I’m using mainly ZWave, but do have some of their Zigbee also. The only issue at times has been actually getting the devices in a timely manner as they don’t tend to carry a lot of stock.
Have you an alternative suggestion? Remember: screw terminals are a biggie, and besides, I think Lutron is way behind in features vs what you spend. Solid product, just outmoded and really ugly.
I have two of the Inovelli red series (z-wave) dimmers and a couple of their red series switches. I would have gotten more but availability was an issue at that time. They are great (I actually had one die and they sent me a replacement right away) and I use them for almost the same thing that you want to do - change color when the front or garage door has not been locked.
The product is very good if you can deal with the availability constraints and also the price.
I have both z-wave and zigbee. Both work equally well. For some reason the z-wave seem to be reluctant repeaters. When I look at my mesh most things seem to bypass them.
I like Inovelli a lot (I have 9 Blue switches and that LED notification bar is indeed the bee's knees - I love it), but I fear they are way out in front of their skis these days with trying to do way too much new stuff (esp with Matter and Europe expansion) with not enough capital and personnel/support. They are stretched precariously thin.
The Blue switches seem to finally be in a good place now, but those dang things gave me way too many headaches along the way -- it was a rocky rollout, and some very serious firmware issues in the first 12-18 months had me close to ripping them all out several times.
To their credit, Inovelli always did eventually come through fixing things for me, but it was frustrating to often be dead in the water waiting on decent firmware, let alone replacement switches and wiring harnesses to fix other ill-performing switches.
I am genuinely rooting for them, but I've also lost a lot of confidence. As with all things, YMMV.
I have a variety of Inovelli devices and have used various generations of their products for years. I have no protcol allegiances, though most of my products from them are Z-Wave because that's all they did for a long time. I have a fair share of Zigbee products now, too, with them having introduced a few Zigbee products recently (and some only in this protocol, like the new fan/light module). I bought the Thread dimmer (2-in-1) for testing but honestly have yet to use it anywhere.
Unless you absolutely need direct Matter support for some reason, I'd stick to another protocol for now, as the hub-accessible feature set is a bit more limited at the moment. I have yet to play around with mine but have read that some features like the LED bar, which sound important to you, do not offer the same advanced level of features.
Beyond that, Hubitat has good support for both Z-Wave and Zigbee as well as Matter, and since you can mix and match devices of any protocol in the same automation, it doesn't really matter. (One exception is if you're hoping to use features like Z-Wave Association or Zigbee binding, but I've never bothered--the hub is fast and reliable enough for any of my automations, in my opinion. This is also not possible for me to do in many cases due to a lot of the devices I control being Hue Bridge devices integrated over the LAN to Hubitat.)
Every switch in my house (spare a few exhast fans that have timer switches) are Inovelli. Mostly Z-wave, though I have a couple of zigbee ceiling fan switches. If you want bells and whistles (e.g., light bar notifications), they are a great brand. What I would do is figure out how many switches you need, order them as a single batch (and get 1 or 2 extras as spares), and then you're good to go, and don't really need to worry about supply shortages.
I don't have any Inovelli devices. I'm sure they are nice.
My experience with Zooz and Jasco Z-Wave switches is they have holes that you put the stripped wire in and then turn a screw; no wrapping around the screw. They are also compact.
The Zooz's I got have an led with 4 colors, red, blue, white, green. The Jasco ultra pro's have 8.
The Zooz' paddle switch have the led visible; the toggles not so much...I did a mod to make it visible. Apparently, paddles are more popular than toggles, lol.
The Jasco's toggle is lit up well, but at the moment (if I recall correctly) they didn't support LR, are over-priced, apparently geared towards "pro's", poor support, poor attitude: turned me off so I went with Zooz.
Long Range Z-wave is something you may want to consider.
They don't do power monitoring. They are pretty flexible though, with Auto Timed On/Off, post outage behavior, non-physical mode, good documentation, good driver support ( @jtp10181 )
My ZEN73 toggle mod below. It looks better than the picture. Red=gate is open. Others in that switchplate are for motion disabling, and I have them blue. Although...I forgot what I had the one on right indicates...I do believe it's nothing at this point, lol.
I mostly have Inovelli dimmers and switches, in a mix of both the Red (Z-Wave) and Blue (Zigbee) models.
They work really well for me, and the notifications are super useful!
In case you might be interested in eliminating some supplemental sensors, they have on pre-order a version of their switches that will include a humidity sensor, and also a version of their blue and red dimmers that will have a mmWave motion/presence sensor. I have a bunch of those on pre-order, can’t wait for them to be ready and shipped!
I have 1 Inovelli Red Fan switch. I don't really have anything negative to say about it.
That said I am like @velvetfoot and I have a good amount of soo ZooZ switches most of them are various Zwave 700 and 800LR version of the Decora style(not toggle). Though the Inovelli are nice the lack of stock and availability, as well as good experiences with Zooz themselves and TheSmartestHouse.com led me to go this route. Inovelli had the opportunity though as the first smart switch in my house was the Inovelli Red Fan Controller.
I wouldn't hesitate to get more Zooz Switches and at this point would be hard pressed to get Inovelli unless they had something specific I couldn't get with Zooz. The MMwave sensor is one of those things that could get me to look at it, but then I am also not completely convinced those will work well built into a switch.
I have used Jasco in the past as well, and at this point all but one has been removed. I saw to many comments about them just randomly failing and being unreliable. The last one of those I have is one with a built in motion sensor, and it works fairly well.
I'll just echo what most have said on availability, but then they get a big shipment in, and everything is stocked for a while.
I have a mixed bag of switches in my house, from Zooz,GE, Inovelli, and Leviton.
When I set my parents house up, I went with all Inovelli for a couple of reasons. First, almost all their switches are 3-way (or more) switches. I (and my parents) really like being able use their AUX switch to control the dimmer from any location. Second was for the notifications on the LED bar. This helps my parents now certain things visually, such as when their alarm system is set. And third, and mom love this feature, is the dimmer staging for at night.
I also added their new zigbee ceiling fan modules in 2 of their fans, and they love them. They have high ceilings and they hated the long chains hanging down. They also love being able to use their GH to control the fans.
If the house has toggles and you have OCD better plan on replacing everything. They don’t (and have stated they won’t in the future) make toggles, only paddles. If that’s not a concern they are solid devices, and they stand behind their product. I once had the founder messaging me from the floor of CES helping me figure out how to wire a switch. You also can’t go wrong with Zooz ?who DOES make toggles if that matters to you). They also have phenomenal customer and support service.
