On our most recent episode of the IoT Podcast, Gareth called in to our voicemail hotline with a question about his older Z-Wave switches. He’s using a Vera hub with about 30 devices and some of his switches are failing. Gareth also uses Google Home and is wondering if he should replace all of the switches with something more compatible.
While Vera’s smart home controllers are excellent, our recommendation is to swap out the switches with different radio technology. There’s nothing inherently wrong with Z-Wave in the smart home. However, we’re starting to see light at the end of the tunnel for Project Connected Home over IP (CHIP), which we expect to bring scores of industry brands under common smart home standards. And for now, Project CHIP is using Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, Zigbee, and Thread radio protocols.
So the recommendation is more a matter of future-proofing and less of saying one radio protocol is better than another in this case. And if possible, we recommend waiting if you can: The first Project CHIP products are due out in 2021.
Stacey is a big fan of Lutron’s line of switches and I can see why. They have a pleasing design and for lack of a better description, they just work. The downside is that you can expect to pay roughly $45 to $50 per switch if you go with Lutron, and you need a hub. That adds up for someone like Gareth who has 30 switches to replace.
That’s why I suggested going with less expensive Wi-Fi switches.
Clearly, Wi-Fi isn’t going away and we know Project CHIP will support them. They may not look as nice as the Lutron option but they’re a solid option for less. I’d consider switches from the C by GE line priced around $40 or from TP-Link, where a three-pack of basic switches will cost you $37.
To hear Gareth’s question in full, as well as our discussion on the topic, tune in to the IoT Podcast below:
Reading this article gives me a en empty feeling in the pit of my stomach… realizing that I just ordered a dozen more z-wave switches which I thought was a great deal. $37 for 3 smart switches is a crazy deal. Will have to add those to my watch list when my oldest zwaves die.
> [Kasa switches] may not look as nice as the Lutron option…
Beauty’s in the eye of the beholder. When deciding what to use in my home, I had narrowed my choice between TP-Link Kasa and Lutron Caseta. One of the reasons I chose the Kasa switches is they look better when beside regular Decora-style switches that won’t ever be upgraded.
We are not there yet, but my prediction for the end game is wifi based switches everywhere there is mains power. Those switches will also have BLE via chips like the ESP32. Since you now have BLE in all of your light switches it makes sense to build BLE sensors. These BLE sensor will attach to the nearest light switch and relay onto the wifi network. You can build 10 year coin cell sensors using BLE.
https://www.ti.com/lit/ug/tidubl2b/tidubl2b.pdf
These sensor will likely be disposable. Just buy a new one 10 years later. That way they can be sealed and be water/humidity proof. Should retail for around $15-20.
The BLE devices will not mesh, they will just hook to the nearest light switch. Meshing on batteries is a bad idea. The light switches can mesh if they want, but it is not required. ESP32 already supports wifi mesh.
Why BLE? 1) You can use BLE to set up the wifi on the switches (no messing with phone being on 5Ghz and switch on 2.4Ghz). 2) BLE is dirt cheap due to every cell phone having it. BLE chips are made by the billions. 3) BLE 5 supports DOA, your light switches can accurately locate BLE trackers.
AFAIK you can not buy a system like this yet. I keep encouraging vendors to build it.
It’s odd the “light at the end if the tunnel” article was full of unknowns that make it hard to say if CHIP is even a good choice.
Vera + zwave is completely local and works with Google voice assistant and Alexa. Zwave devices can be moved to other controllers.
Will CHIP be fully local? Will CHIP devices be hard-locked to one ecosystem? What products will actually be available in 12 months? What devices will act as bridges for CHIP battery powered thread devices?
Lots of unknowns with the tech, let alone the actual shipping products merits.
No clues yet.
I totally disagree here…
If you have 30 smart switches, you don’t want to be sharing your home wifi with a system that is polling all those switches every second. Wifi is a fixed size bandwidth pie and you want as few devices taking a slice as possible.
Yes you can make 10 year BLE coincell devices. But not ones that control a relay and are polled for status every second or two.
CHIP (now Matter) is awesome but it is just IP transactions at the upper level. If you have Z-wave devices, you already have an IP to Z-wave bridge. And it is just software to translate one message format to another on your IP network.
You’d be a fool to rip out a stable Z-wave network just to chase the next protocol. Time is on your side… Either Z-wave is going to be supported and you are fine or some other standard will become dominant and it will only get cheaper and more stable the longer you wait.
David
With Hubitat Elevation, we can still control our home–even if the Internet connection fails. Let a car run into a utility pole, lightening strike a local POP, someone screw up in the Apple/Google/Amazon/Microsoft data centers….or just the Russians/Chinese go hacking again… There is something to be said for a _truly_ smart home–one independent of a slave’s master…
There are a number of home automation systems available these days which run primarily locally, only using the cloud for interaction with things like the third-party voice assistants. Hubitat, Homeseer, and HomeKit will all run without the Internet.
If Matter becomes essential to making sales in the home automation market, Zwave offers a Z wave over IP protocol now and it would be pretty simple for them to add a bridge device that would still let you keep your existing Z wave switches.
I think it’s way too soon to make a decision about which protocol to choose for the future. Each has pluses and minuses.
The major problem with Wi-Fi is that it’s using up address slots on your Wi-Fi router. If you want to have hundreds of home automation devices in your set up, it’s unlikely that you’ll be choosing Wi-Fi for those. (Obviously Thread or zigbee via Matter could help solve that issue, but it’s something to be aware of.)
The second issue is power usage for the device itself. Wi-Fi uses about eight times the power of Zigbee or thread just to run the basic radio. If you’re concerned about being green, you’re operating on a solar powered system, or you just want better battery life, you’re unlikely to choose Wi-Fi. this is exactly why HomeKit, for example, supports thread and Bluetooth for the battery powered devices, while mostly using Wi-Fi for the mains powered ones.
In my own home we run off of a solar powered battery system, so every watt matters. Wi-Fi switches are a comfortable idea for people who are interested in the nuts and bolts of other protocols. But the other protocols exist for a reason. It’s going to be a while before we know where the industry will standardize, even for DIY residential home systems.
Sorry, that should have been “are a comfortable idea for those who are not interested in the nuts and bolts of other protocols.“ My bad.
On all of your devices and your router, change the netmask on your 192.168.x.x block to 255.255.0.0 instead of 255.255.255.0 and you will have 65535 addresses available. If that is not enough move over to 10.x.x.x with a netmask of 255.0.0.0 and you can have 16,777,215 devices. I suspect that will be enough for a house.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_network
The theoretical number of addresses can be changed by changing the mask, but you almost always run into hard limits because of the limited resources each physical router has.
Depending on the brand and model, many residential WiFi routers will limit you to 32 or so simultaneous connections, regardless of what the address is. So increasing the number of available addresses doesn’t increase the number of connections you can make.
Other routers will let you try to do more, but can literally overheat or run into other resource limitations that was shut down message processing.
And then the independent third-party protocols may have their own limits built into their addressing structures. For example, Z wave has a hard limit of 232 devices per network at the present time, although there are plans to increase that with Zwave LR.
So increasing the number of working devices isn’t as simple as increasing the number of addresses you can give out. You need to have the infrastructure in place to support the additional network traffic, and that can get complicated in a residential setup.
I have over 350 devices on my LAN and my routers have never complained. IOT devices place very little load on a router. Nothing compared to my seven FIresticks. I think you will find that modern routers can handle way more than 32 devices.
The Zwave limit only comes into play if you’re using an IP bridge, sorry if that was confusing.
But the main point was changing the number of IP addresses you can have on your private network doesn’t change the number of Wi-Fi connections your router will support. Two separate issues.
Wifi switches as what is currently available are complete garbage. Internet reliant, app specific. Where is the interoperability? This is a step backwards. I’m moving my HA system from insteon to zwave, and have zero interest in this wifi nonsense. The only wifi iot devices I have and will have deployed are esp32 and esp8266 based I made myself because there is no commercial OPEN option available. Looking at Decora paddle wifi junk that’s available now…no, I pass.
I wouldn’t make any change right now. With Matter launching in a few months, I would hold off making any change until we know how things will look in the summer. Will there be a Zwave hub from someone with Matter support giving us universal control of zwave? Will we have to build our own with Home Assistant and a Raspberry PI. Stick your light switch money under your smart things hub and wait.
I agree with Lawrence K: unless you absolutely have to make a change right now, it’s probably worth waiting to see what happens with Matter.
That said, there are some Wi-Fi switches now that don’t require a cloud and are decent candidates if you want to go with Wi-Fi. (I personally use Lutron, but that’s a proprietary protocol.)
You can use Shelly relays locally and with MQTT, and they’re a good inexpensive open platform option. They might make your candidate list.
And of course anything that works with HomeKit will work locally with that, although I understand that may not be something you’re interested in. Still for those who are OK with HomeKit, there are several brands in that space, including Leviton, Meross, Legrand, etc.