I have a slightly larger z-wave installation consisting of 130 nodes in 3 storey house. The installation is based on a Fibaro Home Center 2 central unit as well as Fibaro, McoHome and Aeotec modules.
Unfortunately, the stability and functionality of the Fibaro Home Center 2 control unit and the Fibaro mobile application is not very satisfactory. The lack of any mechanisms to debug z-wave networks in Fibaro (or access to z-wave logs) prevents me from finding and fixing problems with the z-wave network. There is also a zero possibility to customize the application interface and the layout of the screens on it.
I am considering switching to the Home Assistant. For several weeks I have been playing on a separate small z-wave network (7 modules in one room) with Home Assistant. As for now, it works OK, but I can notice a long start time of the z-wave network (much bigger than in Fibaro).
Question - what is the stability and speed of z-wave implementation in Home Assistant with more modules (130? Or more)? Is the Home Assistant worth considering for such networks, or I should be looking for other (commercial?) gateways here?
If I have to consider other gateways, which will provide me the greatest stability / functionality with such a large network and the ability to create my own screens (dashboards) on iPhone / iPad applications? Something similar to Home Assistant Lovelace?
Not exactly what you are looking for, but I have about 45 devices right now. Startup time is a few minutes. The overall mesh is pretty good with 2 hops for a few devices. You can see the logs pretty easily in Home Assistant, but with 130 devices, it will be tough.
Check out this topic though. It provides a basic diagram showing node connections. Useful for troubleshooting. I don’t know if it truly shows the entire picture or not, but still a great project.
Intel NUC and Aeotec z-wave stick. So this isn’t hardware problem (low cpu power).
Home Assistant starts in a few seconds, but it needs minute-two for full z-wave init. So the question: how long it will be with 130 nodes?
130 devices is a lot. Depends how often you plan on playing around with your configuration that will require restarting HA. I’d be more inclined to find something separate for now still or two separate HA instances to isolate your zwave network. Then use something like mqtt to pass state changes. However that is just adding another layer of complication.
Or another option for two HA instances is have node-red in between to do the call services/automations from zwave state changes.
The zwave upgrades in HA are only planned, there is no timeframe yet to improve the component unfortunately.
No great advice from my side, but I was struggling with similar questions. I’ve decided to give HA a shot based on the replies on my questions, forum topic: Best practices setting up big z-wave network.