I ended up selling the house with everything Z-Wave still in it, and the new owners were happy to have a "Smart Home" capable home, but I will never again touch Z-Wave.
Once your Z-Wave network grows past a certain number of devices it becomes too chatty and devices will be unable to communicate data. That led to motion sensors being incredibly slow and or not triggering when needed. Light bulbs wouldn't change colors until seconds or sometimes minutes later when the network was freed up enough to send the commands.
These days I have three systems: Zigbee (through Ikea TRADFRI and Philips Hue), Lutron (Caseta wireless), and Thread (through HomeKit).
I have a bunch of sensors on both Zigbee and Thread and they fire in HomeKit and HomeKit takes actions to turn on/off lights as necessary.
Lights turn on/off almost instantly, motion sensors just work (the Thread ones especially are incredibly fast), I've got temperature sensors/lightbulbs on Thread as well.
I am looking forward to seeing what Matter/Thread bring next as that is definitely where I will be concentrating my purchases. Z-Wave had a chance, and unfortunately it did not seem architected/high bandwidth enough for the amount of devices I ended up having on my Z-Wave network (~200 devices)...
I can't say I _love_ dealing with Z-Wave. But I do like having a single protocol throughout my house. At the very least, any issues I have tend to be consistent. I'd say in this past 6-months, I've practically had zero problems. I blame that overall improvement on ZwaveJs, because some of these devices are at least 5 years old and they're just cranking away without issue right along side my more recent Zooz and Inovelli devices.
That said, I've been strongly considering multiple Z-wave hubs, each running zwave2mqtt with a central mqtt server just to keep everything as fast as possible.
Lutron Caseta for physical in-wall switches, IKEA Tradfri for cheap motion sensors/lighs, Philips Hue for more expensive motion sensors/lights, and a whole slew of Thread enabled devices, all controlled from HomeKit.
I don't really notice that its a bunch of different protocols/wireless standards underneath. I can control it from a single location which also makes it easier for guests/people visiting. Hand them an iPad with the Home app and they can control the house, or add them a Guest to my home on their own iOS devices.
I do miss some of the more advanced Home Assistant stuff I was doing, but overall the experience has been much cleaner, and with almost 0 lag.
It just left a horrible taste in my mouth, and once bitten, twice shy is definitely the case here.
The other thing that made things slow was sleepy devices that would wake up to report status. Things like motion sensors that also reported humidity, light levels, temperature and more (I do wish I could find a sensor like that for Zigbee/Thread... the multiple things in one was kinda nice). Every time they would wake up to report it would flood the network with traffic. And with each additional sensor I would have to tweak how often that would happen (and thus how accurate the data was over time) to reduce the amount of chatter on the network.
If you've watched Linus Tech Tips videos recently, there's hours of content covering his Z-Wave woes. It's funny, his house is supposed to be automated but it ends up eating significantly more of his time in debugging than a manual house would.
I bought Meross products off Amazon in bulk and absolutely love them. I have single pole switches, 3 way switches, single pole dimmers, 3 way dimmers, and a few smart plugs, power strips, and RGB bulbs.
PS: I even have a few Z-Wave devices and bought Zooz Hub ZST10-700 to work with HomeAssistant. I use these to measure power consumption on a garage freezer and a space heater. As long as the Z-Wave devices are close to the hub, there's no issue. But oddly enough they sometimes send negative power usage data which HA complains about.
I like that my smart home is not a full time job. It's nice being set it and forget it. Heck I've spent more weekends stopping Windows breaking my NVR recording system then Zigbee. It's great.
No it's not perfect but agree with others that the S2 seems to be way better.
Also bandwidth as a metric to aim for seems like a bad choice for IoT to me.
IEEE 802.15.4 - a PHY standard, equivalent to 802.11 standards that WiFi is built on top of.
Z-Wave - a recently acquired technology that vertically slices the entire OSI model, defining PHY interaction, network communication, and application. SiLabs recently acquired it, but it has always only offered chips from a single company.
Zigbee - multiple versions of several standards: the most popular used the 802.15.4 standard for the PHY, but used custom networking and custom application layers.
Thread - a 6LoWPan mesh network protocol, built on top of 802.15.4. It provides the Networking layer, but does not define application layers. Allows for IPv6 traffic. It also defines some security and BLE interop. Lots of companies make Thread chips and offer their own Thread stacks
Matter - an Application layer standard that defines the shape and behavior of messages sent across a variety of different networking technologies: Thread, WiFi, etc. Requires IPv6, and potentially border routers to translate the PHY differences.
What "Source Code Project" supposed to even mean? Any source code is part of some project(s).
"Z-Wave Alliance Announces Z-Wave Source Code Project is Complete, Now Open and Widely Available to Members"
The three last words are the key.
I was getting excited as well, but looks like Z-Wave is still going to a closed group thing.
"The goal of the source code project is to provide a rich development environment containing relevant source code and sample applications under BSD 3 License."
https://z-wavealliance.org/z-wave-alliance-completes-z-wave-...
> The goal of the source code project is to provide a rich development environment containing relevant source code and sample applications under BSD 3 License. The Z-Wave source code project will enable members to contribute code to the project under the supervision of the new OS Work Group (OSWG).
Which doesn't clarify at all. Is OS "open source" or "operating system", or something?
Is the relevant source code also BSD licensed? What does it include?
My guess is that this is a teaser article for an event that happened last month, and the repo is open now (or they forgot to open it).
Anyway, I came here to figure out what Z-Wave is, and why it is better than other smart home networks. Any ideas?
z-wave was proprietary which did not help its deployments, but still I recall it was the most deployed low power wireless devices for IoT. I worked on zigbee and never liked it. I wish z-wave was more open back in time.
Did not track what's going on these days for low power mid-range wireless, general feeling is that zigbee did not take off, zwave is used as before(you license it and put it to your sensors), and more and more are using low-power wifi and even bluetooth instead.
You're looking at 2-5x the cost of a Zigbee device. Zigbee is not without it's problems but I've been able to solve mine with $14 repeaters while my Z-Wave problems have complicated solutions and still might be solvable.
Many vendors make USB dongles with Z-Wave Controller interfaces hanging off of them that you can interface using a terminal. These dongles allow anyone to make their own Gateway for controlling other Z-Wave devices.
Because the interface is completely controlled and locked down, it means vendors can't embrace/extend Z-Wave or lock their devices down to their own proprietary controller.
There are some downsides to this setup, like distributing updated firmware for devices is challenging. No one wants to hand their blobs over to opensource projects to allow them to push updates.
With the investment into Thread (still sharing frequency with 2.4 GHz WiFi) I could see this changing.
The range and battery life is likely due to the lower-frequency it uses, which is less congested and longer range. Typically, this will translate to a lower power usage (better battery life).
Meanwhile, this HN discussion has people telling others to never use battery-powered Z-Wave devices, or it'll be laggy...
Matter and Thread can work with Z-Wave devices with the help of a bridge, so it's not as bad as you might think.
But yes, this is an attempt to compete with Zigbee.
Its claims to fame is having reasonable response times/batteru life and being based on IPv6. Being based on IP allows devices to talk to one another, and for bridging those devices to the broader network and potentially to the internet with clear layer separation.
Matter is a IP-based IoT discovery and use standard. Devices advertise Thread and/or Wifi support for wireless support. It also standardizes onboarding (I know BLE is an option there) and the underlying security, and mandates certain capabilities such as supporting multiple 'admin' software at once.
Devices using other wireless tech can also theoretically work with Matter with a gateway that does protocol translation, supports device onboarding, and then exposes them onto the network.
Zigbee allows using multiple vendors with ease, not tied to just one manufacturer.
Again, no internet connection required.
With Zigbee, AIUI you get a mostly closed system locked in to whichever Zigbee vendor you chose. Interoperability only occurs at a higher level in a much more error-prone and lowest common denominator fashion.
No, all devices should work with other vendors. Some vendors don't play as nice, however. The Zigbee light-link spec should allow all lights to work with all light controllers (eg zigged remotes on the wall). Any "true" hub should work with all zigged devices too. Some minor company's hub may not support all products, but thats if they don't comply with the protocol - ZWave theoretically has that problem.
Zigbee is probably more "open" since the protocol has less certification requirements. The only main bifurcation is that "Zigbee" and "Zigbee Light Link" are slightly different and you may end up with a "ZLL" hub that doesn't support non-light devices.
> And if my Internet connection is down, or even the controller is down, the system still functions with graceful degradation only.
Zigbee supports this behavior. You can pair lights/remotes for example with no hub required. Its usually advertised as a graceful upgrade path instead of a degradation path.
See: https://z-wavealliance.org/matter-1-0-is-here-and-z-wave-is-...
Also: https://www.silabs.com/blog/bridging-non-matter-devices-to-a...
I don't agree, I think Z-wave will work with Matter using bridging.
Thread is basically a full wifi-ish TCP/IPv6 stack, so, again, pretty huge compared to a tiny little zwave firmware.
Interesting angle to think about: Is the middle or end of a chip shortage the worst possible time to ship a HUGE new standard, or is it the best possible time because there's no stockpile of smaller memory smaller CPU legacy microcontrollers?
There's already available evidence that contradicts that prediction. Eve[1] is rolling out a firmware update for Matter support that makes their devices usable across all Matter supported platforms. There are some features that aren't yet available at the Matter level so those will remain in their own app for now. Despite being iOS-only previously with Matter support they're now also reaching Android devices and are working on an Android app for it too to cover the missing features in Matter.
[1]: https://www.theverge.com/2022/12/12/23505097/matter-eve-firm...
At some point there'll be a matter/thread bridge to z-wave.
The big question about matter/thread devices is cost.
The second is going to be security. If they're IPv6 then they're globally addressable, which is bad bad bad. How is that going to be mitigated? Is the hub going to be the router for those devices and block all incoming connections?
I'm sure this is all in the docs somewhere.
I think you need to read up on IPv6 a bit. There are whole IPv6 ranges set aside that are not globally routable / part of the global unicast range[1].
Thread has link-local and mesh-local addresses. The global is only gained through SLAAC/DHCP or manual configuration by an administrator so by default no, your devices aren't accessible to the outside world. And if you do have routable IPv6 in your network, you should already have a firewall on your network edge for this because all your existing devices would already be exposed. The addressing primer[2] for Thread also applies to Matter for further details.
[1]: https://www.iana.org/assignments/ipv6-address-space/ipv6-add...
[2]: https://openthread.io/guides/thread-primer/ipv6-addressing
All ipv6 addresses are routeable but that doesn't mean reachable. Link local and Unique local addresses are examples of non-global ipv6 addresses.
Conversely, I have 30+ Zigbee switches, and they are quite reliable.
The only reason that I have the 3 Z-wave switches is that I needed paddle switch fan controllers with an almond color, and I could only find them in Z-wave by Enbrighten. (Side note: why are almost ALL the smart switches only available in white?)
Of course, as I type this, my RPi with HomeAssistant got bricked with the latest update, so now my SmartHouse is not merely dumb, it's stubborn!
This open source project reportedly will start allowing more chip vendor as well, so it will be interesting how that affects the ecosystem.
* UPB - Universal Powerline Bus (powerline)
* Insteon (powerline + wireless)
* Z-Wave (wireless)
* Zigbee (wireless)
Of these, Zigbee seems to be in the best position these days.
Z-Wave is/was a closed system - you had to get compatibility testing/certification in order to sell products using the tech. It's fairly lightweight, reliable, and well respected by users.