[New to HA, but have been doing home automation for 20 years, starting with X10, and most recently migrating from Hubitat.]
I’ve got HA up and running on a VM under Windows, and have used an old Gen5 Z-Wave stick I had laying around to migrate my two first devices using Z-Wave JS UI. Looking forward to migrate the rest from Hubitat, but before I do that, I want to make sure I have “the best” sticks for Zigbee and Z-Wave.
For Zigbee, there’s the “official”(?) SkyConnect. With regards to USB sticks is there even a reason to look elsewhere? I have limited experience with Zigbee.
For Z-wave there’s…yes what? I have had much more experience with pairing and unpairing devices than I ever wanted to have, because my DIN Qubino dimmers have worked so badly. So compatibility would be my main concern here. No current need for Secure/S2 devices, but you’ll never know.
Since I will be running this on a VM on my server (potentially in a closet), I want to put both interfaces fairly far way from the physical server. I might be able to use some kind of USB-over-IP box to extend the sticks to a better place, but on the other hand there might be “sticks” connecting to HA over IP directly that would work better?
Any recommendations? What about Thread/Matter. No experience of them so far, but I guess possibility to do Matter over Zigbee will be useful in the future.
For Zigbee, I started with the Sky Connect and an extension cable on my bare metal NUC and it worked reasonably well. However, my HA server was to one side of my house and I had slow response for further away devices, and occasional device drops throughout the network, despite the handful of Zigbee smart plugs scattered through the house to act as routers.
I switched to the Smlight SLZB-06 because it can run over USB, WiFi or PoE and has a big beefy antenna. This means for now I can run it over Wifi located centrally in my home, and once I set up a centralized server rack, I can switch it over to PoE. It’s been 2 weeks now, and I haven’t had one of my 30 devices go unavailable, and the previously finicky devices are rock solid and fast to respond. I couldn’t be happier. Plus, Smlight is based in Ukraine, so it’s one tiny gesture of support during their country’s horror.
Update 2024-10-28: A few of my more isolated water leak detectors do still drop off every few weeks for a brief time so it seems I do still need to add one or two Zigbee routers at the edges of my network. That said, I still like this coordinator. Being able to put it anywhere is great, and the admin UI is excellent for configuration, firmware updates, etc.
Thanks a lot - that seems to be a great product! Do you know of any corresponding device for Z-Wave or do you only run Zigbee?
I need to learn more about different Zigbee implementations in HA it seems… In this case: should I use Zigbee2MQTT (regular stick) or ZHA (“M” variant?)? This page says that IP-connected coordinators are not recommended for ZHA - which might be an argument for Zigbee2MQTT. Which on the other hand will probably be more features and possible complications than I need (my home is mainly Z-Wave).
I only run Zigbee, so I’ve no idea about Zwave hardware.
I’ve been using ZHA since I started. I know z2m is supposed to be more powerful, but ZHA works for me. I know if I wanted to run multiple coordinators, I’d need to switch to z2m but I have a fairly simple network and HA setup. I’ll stick with ZHA until I find a need that requires I switch.
I was nervous about running a Zigbee network with a wifi coordinator but it’s working fine so far. I use Zigbee channel 25 and my 2.4Ghz wifi is on channel 6 to reduce any interference, after verifying that 25 was the most open channel in my immediate area.
One of the zigbee smart plugs I put in place just to be a router with my old coordinator. One of these days I’ll remove that and see what happens. But if it ain’t broke…