Zigbee and Z-Wave are the best part of my smart home

But reality seems to be more nuanced than that:

Matter devices can be "dumb". They're intended to be able to work without Internet. Matter uses IP, and Thread provides IPV6, but that doesn't mean that either thing needs to be able to talk to the WAN.

Wifi devices can also be "dumb". For example: I have ESPHome devices that Just Work and that don't have any outside connectivity.

I don't advise anyone who asks me about smart home stuff. I'll tell them some about what I'm doing in my own home, and answer any questions they have accurately, but their eyes glaze over when they hear phrases like Zigbee or MQTT, and they've completely stopped listening by the time something like Home Assistant comes 'round.

I don't know that Matter and/or Thread will make anything better or more secure by default. The Matter 1.0 spec is only a year and a half old and it isn't clear at all how implementation is going to wind up being shaped in the real world.

But they can improve things and I hope that they will.

> Pick Zigbee or Z-Wave

Picking both is fine. Zigbee is significantly cheaper, but you have to make sure that the device is interoperable (Ecobee is a good example of a manufacturer to avoid - Zigbee interoperability is optional). If not, that's where Z-Wave steps in. Having an "off-brand" Zigbee adapter is a good bullshit force field. I use the Aoetec USB for Z-Wave and the Sonoff USB for Zigbee. Both are incredibly interoperability conscious, so I have no problem supporting them (I also have a lot of Zooz devices, who are equally awesome).

All the WiFi devices went to Goodwill.

There’s really good WiFi smart home hardware out there, like anything Leviton ships I’d recommend. There’s also a lot of crap out there too.

I think the ideal smart home device can connect to the internet to check for updates either when I manually want to update it or setup an auto update schedule. An account should NOT be required, which sadly lots of smart home hardware requires.

> I'm not super keen on Thread/Matter seeing how one of its goal seems to be allowing your devices access to the internet which is the exact opposite of what I want.

Happily, that's not a goal and definitely not a requirement. Thread/Matter work great without internet access unless you use them via a platform which does (e.g. Alexa).

There are some fantastic products (LIFX, Twinkly) that are WiFi and don't require the cloud. Zigbee falls apart when controlling a large number of devices in real-time.

I use Hubitat but everything is Z-wave except for one Alexa-only bulb, which was a gift so I can't get rid of it.

What I've learned is that smart wall switches of all types are still too failure-prone for me. Now I'm converting back to standard wall switches with Z-wave relays wired in behind them. I don't like the extra lag they have, but I do like that standard wall switches last forever compared to smart wall switches.

If anyone knows how to reduce the lag, I'm all ears. The switch operates the relay which sends its signal to the hub, which then sends a signal back for the light to turn on. This process introduces a noticeable time delay between the switch closing and the light coming on.

In my experience it's more nuanced. Some of my most unreliable devices are Zigbee (but they're also Aqara, and that may well be the real problem there). My Z-Wave devices have been pretty solid once configured, but they were also some of the most finicky to get paired up and on the network. My WiFi switches have been rock steady, not a single problem.

I’ve used Tasmota with Wi-Fi and mqtt and it works great.

I use both and both work well. There a pos/negs to both, Zigbee tends to be cheaper, but there is a complete lack of dimmer plugs.

Also wifi devices always seem to want a special app or account registration first, whereas with Zigbee you just allow new devices and then turn on your new device.

Shelly's WiFi devices are all fairly cloud-optional - you can completely disconnect the internet and they will all work with Home Assistant just fine. Still, I'm not as excited about them as I used to be (mainly due to realizing there's a ton of cool-looking I/O flexibility they have that ends up being redundant once you settle on a control plane for wifi - MQTT in my case), and because their exposure of features and properties is somewhat inconsistent across device families.

But as a way to unburden your (usually one and only) Zigbee channel from certain types of chatty messaging, such as high-accuracy presence sending or complex lighting curve adjustments that can't be done ergonomically (or at all) via Zigbee, they are invaluable. Wifi (jailed in a VLAN, if you like) also provides a layer of failure protection should your Zigbee coordinator die unexpectedly.

Thread is based on Zigbee. It functions fine without the internet.

That was my approach as well when I invested some years ago in various dimmers, heater controllers and such.

One positive with Z-wave is that fallback is built into the protocol. So the switches can talk directly to the appropriate dimmer if the controller is down, for example.

I think your attitude is almost exactly right but I will add: you can pick both. The two ecosystems don't really step on each others' toes and as long as you find a hub(s) to feed a single view there are basically no downsides.

If you're using 2.4GHz WiFi, then consider Z-Wave. It's a little pricier, but doesn't use the same chunk of RF spectrum (so won't cause interference).

I can't say I agree with the "pick one" as had I done that I wouldn't have the ability to compare reliability post install and cost pre.

Certain devices just aren't available in one or the other network, or are not cost effective.

In the end it's just one more USB stick.

I've seen a lot of references to Zigbee2MQTT. If I'm going to be using it through Home Assistant anyway, why should one choose Zigbee2MQTT over say ZHA?

I went with Lutron Caseta switches (though they're not the only ones that do this) for that reason. When all else fails, they are just dimmers and remotes that talk to said dimmer. When I want them to be more than that, they work with HomeKit and Home Assistant just great. But Lutron is a switch company first and foremost, and that shows in these switches. They surpass the Partner Acceptance Factor.

I'd add to your advice and say "do as much as you can to keep the experience vanilla," which in this case means standard fixtures and bulbs, just replacing the switches. For the price of half of one Hue bulb, my whole fixture is smart now, and I can still use whatever bulb I want.

Yea, the behaviour I want is always just to enhance not replace.

This is why I dislike smart bulbs with dumb switches and similar bad combos. Smart home appliances shouldn't hide any features behind an app either. But every manufacturer has perverse incentives to push their apps.

I have one place like this. There is no connection from the switch to the lightbulb. If the network is down, no lights.

I have some TP-link press-switches (so no on-off, just press to invert state), and they work amazing.

They work when the network is down. And you can read the state. Even if you turn off the network, flip the state, and turn it back on, it works correctly.

The key engineering point here is about failure modes. If the failure mode is a brick, then the engineering and design team behind that switch has failed.

The failure mode for a smart switch needs to be a "classic" switch. This applies equally to garage door openers, showers, door locks, and the rest of the smart devices.

Note: I'll give a bit of a pass to smart window blinds as a selling point is lack of strings and cables and the therefore look cleaner.

Related to this, I still think think the original version of the Hue Tap switch was clever and I'm still surprised didn't have more clones and didn't entirely survive the internal revision wars/external protocol wars: the original didn't use a disposable "button" battery and instead used mechanical energy of pushing the button to power sending the Zigbee signal. It takes more force than a regular light switch to hit it with enough physical power, but it's also kind of satisfying in the way a mechanical keyboard button can be or a big chonky "snooze button" that you kind of want to smack with some force anyway.

I've heard it said that sort of mechanical powered switch with Thread/Matter is much harder, except with these old existing ones in bridges with old Zigbee compatibility, and more's the pity. It still seems such a good idea to me, one less battery to waste/go bad at exactly the wrong time.

Check out the Shelly products. They use local control of a relay using standard switching hardware, so if your network is broken the lights still work as normal. Technically the switch isn't actually switching the power so there's _some_ element of electronics between you and mains power, but it's close enough for me.

That's the reason why I've chosen KNX. As long as there's power, it's working. Just keep a spare power supply and you'll be fine.

Also no mesh and network fiddling, just a bus wire.

Is this true of Zwave? From what I understood, one of the reasons that zwave devices are substantially more expensive, is that the licensing and certification requirements are much more strict. There also isn't a "first party" zwave hub that I can find. The Zwave alliance seems to only deal with the protocol and licensing, thus, any hub that claims to support zwave, will work with any zwave device.

This seems like an edge case. It’s pretty rare to see a product advertise a protocol that isn’t freely used like this one. It even explicitly says in the product description it requires a hub. Aqara has always played fast and loose with support of various open specs.

Ecobee remote thermometers use Zigbee, but they can’t be generally paired to non ecobee products, and as such they don’t advertise Zigbee support.

Thread and matter are a mess from both technical and consumer angles. Yes, they are both good technologies...but the players in the hub space have made an utter mess of it if you have multiple hubs or, like most Americans, use an iPhone but have Nest or Echo devices. Then you have the lack of adoption of thread in general. And finally, Matter support being always 6 months away for everything or just straight up not working. It is mind blowing to me that it was easier for me to set up my Wiz bulbs to work in Homekit via HA than to get them to actually frickin work over Matter...seeing as the Matter logo was on the box when I bought them.

Honestly, I'm kinda shocked that no hub company has shipped a Cheap Zwave/Zigbee integrated HA hub. Sure you have HA Green and Yellow and all that, but you could get that price way down with a simple partnership and purpose built hardware that is elegant.

I haven't looked too much into thread/matter, but my understanding of them has been basically this: https://xkcd.com/927/

I shudder at the idea of ipv6 addresses for my lightbulbs.

I’m a latecomer to the home automation game, so I’m speaking from theory more than experience. In the environments where I’m thinking about building out, the WiFi is… you know, fine, but it’s not a rock solid corporate campus pushing reliable signal to every crevice of every garage and outbuilding where I might be interested in adding sensors. Power, though, is plentiful, and Zigbee’s auto-meshing capabilities are therefore attractive to me.

I also have an impression that Zigbee et al are more friendly to extremely low-power, battery-operated sensors participating in the network in situations where a WiFi radio might drain down quickly.

You do mention occupancy sensors, though—if you have experience with battery-powered models that work reliably on WiFi, I’d be open to changing my mind.

There's at least a few interesting points for zigbee:

* If you use universal hub like Home Assistant, they are pretty interoperable between various manufacturers

* Devices don't have direct connection to internet (again esp. with HA), so better privacy, they are faster (no cloud lag) and do not depend on internet connection

* Battery life is way better for small devices

* Mesh is nice when you have bigger area to cover

* If you have to use shitty ISP router, it will have issues with large number of devices

* Usually easy push-to-pair setup

And there isn't many downsides - one time cost of some kind of coordinator and very slightly pricier equipment.

For zigbee, you could either obtain a zigbee/usb dongle (interact over virtual serial port to send zigbee commands - tons of libraries exist to provide an api surface), or obtain a hub and figure out its api.

Zigbee also has functional mesh features that wifi doesn't. One is designed for high bandwidth single point communication while the other is designed for low bandwidth long range.

How long do your battery-powered devices last?

AFAIK a big benefit of Zigbee is that it's designed to be low-power. I have motion sensors that last for 2-3 years on a coin battery, depending on location/traffic. Mains-powered devices like lightbulbs act as repeaters in a Zigbee network, so placement can be anywhere.

ZigBee is a mesh network, this is very important in many situations eg. battery powered or large area

HomeKit-over-Thread and Matter-over-Thread has been pretty okay in my experience, using HomePods and an Apple TV 4K as the border routers. I'm using Home Assistant, and the HomePods control everything nicely. Setup is a little weird (you have to set up your devices in HomeKit first, remove and then add again in Home Assistant without resetting) but they work great. My only complaint is that HomePod Software and tvOS updates tend to bork the devices until I reboot HA, but that takes 10 ish seconds so not a big deal.

I tried that and gave up. Get ready to spend a lot of moeny, sensors and devices are still very expensive compared to the ZB counterparts. Most Matter devices go with Wifi rather than Thread which makes your wifi network implode if you plan on installing a large number of them. For that reason I decided to go with what's cheap and works today, which is Zigbee.

That is a super bad advice: most of the matter stuff simply unstable, very few devices. Apple's support is also subpar and unstable.

This is very bad advice. You should do the opposite of that. Buy Z-Wave devices and use them. They just work.

Later, your Hub will add Tread/Matter support and you can do that too, but right now it's not worth the trouble.

I went with zigbee simply because there seems to be a ton of devices available, and while many vendors try to build devices that don't adhere to default messages so you'd have to use their gateways that talk to the cloud, zigbee is simple enough to reverse engineer the communication and add support in all the open source ha solutions.

Anecdote from the other side: my zwave devices just work for 8 years now, while there are times some zigbee devices just don’t respond. I suspect the zwave network is more stable because all routers are powered all the time, while I have lots of zigbee bulbs that are behind a real switch so they leave the network if I turn the lights off. There seems like to be no way in zigbee from preventing those devices to be used as routers.

I've found that some people have great zigbee experiences and terrible z-wave and just as many are the opposite. I chalk it up to individual environments etc. Go with what works best from you.

What zwave devices have you been using? I have only used zwave (leviton, ge) and have only had to restart a switch 2-3 times. My biggest gripe with zwave was when home assistant switched the supported plugin.

Interesting, maybe your ZWave dongle is not the greatest? I also run a mix of ZWave & Zigbee with their own appropriate dongles plugged into my Home Assistant server and they've both been great. No issues with devices dropping or needing to manually repair anything.

For both I use a 6ft USB extension cable to mount the dongles up on the wall behind my server instead of hanging out of the USB port.

I had that experience with Z-Wave using openzwave. Then I switched to node-zwave-js and the difference was night and day. All unreliability gone.

My impression is that it therefore very much depends on the quality of the controller software since various mesh management operations are delegated to it.

It's the opposite for me. I have so many problems with Zigbee devices dropping off the mesh for no reason and batteries dying in 1/10th the advertised time.

Meanwhile my ESPHome devices have never had any issue whatsoever.

If you have a lot of it it's an ever ongoing war with empty batteries and lost pairing though. Every week I have to fix some switch, temperature or door sensor...

Regardless of theory, my experience has been that WiFi communications are significantly less reliable than Zigbee or BLE, and typically have worse latency to boot.

Unless you have a bunch of WiFi APs around your house, practical range with Zigbee is also better than WiFi because powered Zigbee nodes (like lightbulbs and switched outlets) act as mesh routers.

One additional benefit of Zigbee and Wave is the possibility of creating battery-less devices, like the Philips Hue Tap switch, which uses a hammer and piezoelectric generator for power.

Add to wifi that if you plan on having a lot of devices your router might commit seppuku.

Zigbee can hold hundreds of devices (as long a you have zb routers in your mesh)

The only "catch" is if you want to use a voice assistant/smart speaker, which is either built into the hub, or requires a integration.

Home Assistant (or, really, any local HA controller) plus a VPN will allow you to control them from anywhere you have Internet connectivity without exposing anything to a cloud-based service.

There are still even ways to expose the zigbee stuff, I can turn my zigbee lights on from the other side of the world and even access it via Google Home but it's on my terms and under my control. The actual switch itself is relatively dumb (which is a positive in this case!)

(not to say you're doing it wrong btw, just to let others know that zigbee can still be linked onwards to the internet from the gateway)

Between timers and motions sensors, I'm pretty much fully covered. There just isn't a reason for me to turn something on or off when I'm away.

There is [1], but it's not open source and 'advanced' functions, like battery operation, cost money. Also this [2] project is promising, but in the early stages I think. Also I guess newer ESP32 support zigbee in principle, there is some discussion of adding this to ESPHome.

[1] https://ptvo.info/zigbee-configurable-firmware-features/ [2] https://github.com/ffenix113/zigbee_home

So for zigbee this is very possible and I've recently done it multiple times without any issues whatsoever.

I used to use a ConbeeII as my zigbee coordinator, but my server rack is located at an awful position in the house for coverage, so I picked up a TubeZB PoE EFR32 based coordinator [1] which has been incredible! I use home assistant, and it was trivial to backup the network, unplug the ConbeeII, put in the IP address of the new coordinator, and import the backup there and everything just continued to work.

Then I had that die, it was actually the PoE portion which died, so I did the reverse and transferred everything back to my ConbeeII while I diagnosed and fixed it, then when it was fixed transferred everything back to the TubeZB coordinator.

It actually took longer to get the IP address assigned on the TubeZB coordinator than it did to transfer my network each time, it was incredibly simple.

I'm not sure for z-wave though. I do use it, but I've never had a z-wave gateway die on me, or had any reason to replace it where I wasn't also moving or something.

[1] https://tubeszb.com/product/efr32-mgm21-poe-coordinator/

I just replaced my Ikea hub (changed from Tradfri to Dirigera). It was annoying to do, but not hard. Took about ~90 seconds for each device. I did them individually, but I could have done them in parallel to speed it up.

Not something I want to do once a month, but once every two years is “reasonable” (compared to non-smart home items).

I believe the re-pair process is a side effect of how security was implemented. I also heard it was technically possible to migrate without pairing, but i think right now it's between hubs from the same manufacturer. It's been years since i checked.

AIUI, at protocol level, Z-Wave supports multiple controllers and if you have two and one dies then you can switch to the other and replace the first. I can't see consumers arranging that though, and nor do I know how to do it.

Zwave devices definitely seem to be "sticky" - you have to unpair/pair each device. At least that's been my experience using Zwave with a Smartthings hub.

If their only worry is using less copper, I am worried.

But at the same time more and more stuff that actually uses heavy bandwidth is moving out into 5GHz and other high frequency bands.