I use both the HS3 custom component with 45 Z-Wave devices including several HS-WD100 dimmers on a ZNET as well the Aeotec Zwave stick on a docker based Zwave2MQTT that has about 10 devices. My experience is that the ZNET and HS3 custom component is more stable than Zwave2MQTT. Adding devices is pretty easy with Zwave2MQTT but you have to be careful when you change device names or remove devices since you may also have to touch HA and/or Zwave2MQTT to make those changes take effect. Also, location of the Aeotec stick is important to have a stable Z-Wave network.
My advise it to move a few Z-Wave devices to Zwave2MQTT and test before doing a wholesale swap. I can’t advise on the stability of the new HA Z-Wave implementation - since i have not tried it.
For me - I’m staying with the HS3 custom component for most of my devices for now. It’s as stable as ever and no need to fix something that’s not broken.
@taylormia can you provide specifics on what you feel in unstable with HA Z-Wave? I think I have been spoiled with HS Z-Wave for so long and have not run into many issues. While I agree about not trying to fix what is not broken, one of the factors as to why I am considering the move is that I had my HS3 VM crash and it corrupted my configuration. Not having a recent backup I am considering just moving all to HA.
In my experience, having tried several different Z-Wave implementations (HA native, the new OZW beta, OpenHAB, Z-Way, Vera, and HS3) over several years now in the home automation hobby, HomeSeer has been by far the most reliable. ZWave devices react quickly and it really is a “set it up and forget it” type of system.
Especially in the HA native implementation, don’t expect the network to be as reliable. In my usage devices would randomly disappear or be marked dead in the network even though the network topology was no different from how I had it set up in HomeSeer, leading to an exclude/include process every now and again. I’m not saying it was totally unreliable or didn’t work 95% of the time, but the WAF drops dramatically when things don’t work as you’ve explained they are supposed to work lol. With HomeSeer, my Zwave network “just works” 99.9% of the time, and that’s how I want it to be.
@ando1 When I first moved to HA from HS3, I took a leap of faith and moved all my 60+ Z-Wave devices to ZWave2MQTT on an Aeotec stick. I had taken HS3’s ZNET Z-Wave network stability for granted and didn’t expect any issues since my Aeotec Z-Wave stick on Z-Wave2MQTT was located a foot away from the ZNET. Over a period of a couple of months - I began noticing random disconnects and delays with devices responding to simple on/off commands as well as automations. The MQTT server was very stable and I use it for many Tasmota based switches and plugs, weewx weather and other devices. Just could not put a finger on exactly what the problem was. After reading many users issues with Z-Wave2MQTT and the WAF sinking very low - I decided to switch most of my devices back to the HS3 ZNET and the HS3 Custom Component for HA. Amazingly, everything stabilized and I haven’t had any disconnects or delays in 9 months. I have seven devices that remain on the Aeotec stick on ZWave2MQTT and they have issues now and then. Today, I had a wall switch five feet away from the Aeotec go “dead” and after restarting ZWave2MQTT - it came back alive. Go figure! I keep these devices on the Aeotec because they are not ZWave Plus and I don’t want to slow down my ZNET network with them.
I completely agree with @marthocoo about the stability of the HS3 ZWave network vs. the HA options.
I love HA compared to HS3 for everything automation - but the options for ZWave on HA are not ready for prime time. Good Luck!
Thanks for the feedback @taylormia and @marthocoo. I think I will stay with HS3 as my Z-Wave hub as I don’t want to be constantly chasing issues. I was hoping that HA Z-Wave had progressed a bit but I will stay the course for now.
To anyone following this thread: I just released a significant upgrade to my custom integration (github.com/marthoc/homeseer) that now offers support for all HomeSeer devices (not just Z-Wave) and expands support for Z-Wave. It must now be configured from the Home Assistant UI, and it’s also now available to install via HACS!
Thanks for the update. How do I update to v. 1.0 from a previous version that I installed using the manual method? Does updating remove/rename the existing entities created from the previous version? Any gotchas?
@taylormia You will, unfortunately, have to lose your entity configuration (names etc). Stop HA, delete the HomeSeer directory from custom components, then follow the instructions in the repo.
It appears the old entities do not get deleted when disabling the original integration (I should have checked first) so when I activated the new integration anything that’s duplicated was created as a “cover” rather than a light or switch.
I assume the workaround is to stop the integration, delete EVERYTHING homeseer, and then restart the HACS-based integration and it will rediscover everything?
@Slappy I’m a bit confused as to why this is happening, but please try to change the “Namespace” to a different string (e.g. “homeseer2”) during the config flow. This should ensure that no previous entity registry entries will mess with your configuration.
The ONLY possible way (currently) for my integration to know to create a cover entity is a) if the device type string is “Z-Wave Barrier Operator” or b) if you select those switch/dimmer refs during the config flow.
To be clear - if you aren’t selecting those refs during the config flow, then something is going wrong. Try this. Delete the configuration entry for HomeSeer. Restart HA. Delete any HomeSeer entities from Configuration - Entities. Restart Home Assistant. Now, there should be no entries for HomeSeer entities in Configuration - Entities. Now add the HomeSeer integration again from Configuration - Integrations.
If there is still a problem after doing the above (i.e. all your switches and dimmers are still covers), then I will happily take debug logs from you to figure out what’s happening. There are instructions in the GitHub repo that describe how to enable debug logging!
I did some extensive debugging, and determined that the problem was the fleshy lump attached to the keyboard. This bag of bones was generating repeated ID10T and RTFM errors and was selecting all entries in the list of devices, assuming that creating a “cover” was some sort of term for importing the devices.
I’ve since rebooted the fleshy lump, read the instructions, and successfully configured the integration!
Jokes aside, this integration is improving in leaps and bounds, and really makes HS migration easy. If you’d like I’d be happy to add some descriptive text to the README in GitHub (assuming I can figure out how to branch and update) to prevent future Neanderthals from missing the nuance about the covers.
Glad to hear you got it figured out! This suggests that I should go into more detail in the README about what is happening at each step of the config flow so that Home Assistant newbies aren’t confused by the terminology!
@marthocoo Just upgraded to HA 2021.3.1. There is a new requirement from v. 2021.3.0 of a ‘version’ key in the manifest file of custom components. I get this warning message:
WARNING (MainThread) [homeassistant.loader] No 'version' key in the manifest file for custom integration 'homeseer'. This will not be allowed in a future version of Home Assistant. Please report this to the maintainer of 'homeseer'
Is this new requirement fixed in version 1.0 of the HS component? If I want to keep my old release of the component (0.8) - can I make a manual change to the manifest file to comply with the new requirement? If so, what would the change be?
In the custom_components/homeseer directory, edit the manifest file to add the version key to the end of the file, but before the final curly brace, like so:
@marthocoo That worked. Thanks. I’m actually on version 0.6. Will update to latest if I add more Z-wave devices. Do you see any downside to remaining on 0.6 if I have’t changed my zwave devices or not planning on adding any more HS devices ?
There’s no downsides necessarily - I found and squashed a couple of bugs that could cause the ASCII listener to disconnect and not reconnect, but if you aren’t experiencing those and don’t need the extra features, then 0.6 should be stable to stay on.
I have also started testing/migrating from Homseer to Home Assistant. Found it a little bit hard in the beginning, however the more I get used to Home Assistant the more I want to migrate more or less everything to HASS. I have a few questions though:
In home seer more or less every light has an On button and Last button that turns the light on to the last level. Is there any way of achieving the “last” action from Home Assistant using the Homeseer integration from HACS?
If Homeseer is rebooted connection is dropped from Home Assistant, is it like this for everyone?
When first importing the devices from homeseer, there were a few options to select the devices you want to import, is there anyway of adjusting these options after the fact? Like remove the events not needed and devices not needed in home assistant.
Must say I realy like the intergration with homeseer and have moved a lot over to home assistant now.
However have only moved a couple of light automations over, this is my biggest issue. When dimming lights I have to put 39 if I want the light full on, 20 is ~50 %. Is no one else haveing this issue?
I believ it is related to when On is sent, it is sending 254 to turn on the light to last value, this is fine, however any level between 40 and 100 and the value sent to homeseer is most likely a value between 100 and 254 which does not make sense to homeseer.
Hi folks. I posted this in another thread, but this one seems to be the active one of Homeseer users looking to move to Home Assistant. I have been using Homeseer for about 10 years, and we built a new house 2 years ago, and made sure it was very automation friendly. In addition to the hardware, I probably have spent about $400 on plugins etc… In general,. it works fairly reliably.
I recently made the HS4 conversion, and like you, the UI in underwhelming. However, I hardly ever use the UI. I don’t need a fancy remote control - I want reliable automation of functions, and it does decently in that domain. The problem recently has been with the google Home automation, and we have probably a dozen hubs in various rooms, and tons of Chromecast devices. Finally the engineers are making progress on fixing it, but it’s been slow, and tech support unhelpful.
So I started to look at HA, and I am shocked at how much support for devices is here. From my Lutron QS system, to thermador home connect, to nuheat thermostats, and even SNMP support to control my APC PDU outlets. It’s pretty amazing.
4 things are in the way for me to move:
Zwave support. I have 5 Andersen Patio doors with built Yale Assure locks, as well as a dome valve that controls the gas to the BBQ (so I don’t forget and leave the grill on overnight!). There are a number of Zwave packages in HA, and I guess zwave.JS is the one to use now. One question, is existing smartstick+ hardware supported, and do I have to reinitialize all the zwave devices from scratch, or can it read the state from the stick and build all the devices? Is it reliable?
The automation and scripts setup is much harder to understand compared to Homeseer’s events setup. I am a pretty decent engineer in networking, and am very comfortable in both linux and windows systems, but being used to homeseer, there is quite a lerning curve to deal with.
Trying to filter devices on the overview and get just the zigbee or HVAC devices showing is very complicated. I have tried playing around with dashboard edits, but there is a learning curve too…
I have multiple VLANs in the house to segments things, deal with kid filters, security cameras, IOT zones, and AV stuff, plus all the Chromecasts and Google homes. Homeseer handles multiple interfaces well, so I didn’t have to make routing work, because I could multihome Homeseer and use the windows firewall to add additional control. It doesn’t appear that HA can support that, so that makes my network configuration much more complicated. Not a showstopper, but more work to do.
Do you all who came over from Homeseer have any advice for me?