I installed a couple dozen HomeSeer switches, dimmers, fan controls in 2017. Since then, I am averaging a few failures a year. I believe at this point I’ve had to replace all of my original HD100/HS100 switches. When they failed, they failed hard. I’ve now had my first failures of more modern equipment. I don’t know exactly what these two are because I haven’t pulled them yet but they both still control lighting from the switch but zwave is dead and the manual reset process does not work.
My question is, given the high rate of failure of these switches, do I continue to replace several a year or do I switch to another brand? I do need some scene control but I don’t need up to 5 taps up and down and while the colored LED are cool, I haven’t found a use case for them. I set my dining room light switch to alternate red/green for Christmas a few years ago and never changed it back (which my wife periodically reminds me about).
My desire to “tinker” with smart home automation has gone off a cliff. I’ve gotten married and had a kid since I started down this road and I have neither time nor inclination to mess with home automation or Home Assistant unless something is broken. Frankly, at this point, I would pay someone else to manage the service and make sure everything is up-to-date and working.
What’s rock solid reliable, super easy to setup, and doesn’t require maintenance? I no longer have a working Zigbee config so it has to be Zwave or wifi.
I can’t remember if the Homeseer switches were actually JASCOs - but I know they were designed similar to the Jascos and I remember them having a lot of the similar issues. In any case.
EVERYONES ZWave smart switches from that era have a pretty craptacular failure rate - don’t judge modern equipment based on those results. I personally replaced somewhere between 32-36 Jasco 12xxx series switches or dimmers over the same period. FORTUNATELY Jasco’s warranty was retroactively updated so most of them were replaced by Jasco… But I digress.
So if im reading between the lines, it’s cool - but not worth the family frustration when things do not work well.
Yes - you’re prob. doomed with those old switches - they’ll all eventually fail IMHO. Don’t build based on them - I’d contact Homeseer (or Jasco if they’re actually OEM’d by Jasco) and see how many of them can be replaced - and if they don’t offer joy, move to something else.
So what do you move to? You’re going to get hundreds of suggestions, but at the end of the day there is NO SINGLE SOLUTION THAT FIXES EVERYTHING FOR EVERYONE. (Your own notes kind of point to that…)
So instead lets assume because you’re here you want a HA based solution - that’s a given. Lets talk about protocols.
‘in the wild’ / garden variety wifi devices.
Most of these don’t follow any single protocol and require a vendor app. Many can be ‘flashed’ or ‘tasmotized’ to make them work with local control - but you don’t sound like you’re in that space. If oyu opt not to ‘flash them’ you’ll be dealing with an integration like Tuya or Govee - and lets just say both have their warts and neither of the integrations are maintenance free.
ESP32 - lots of devices out here in this class - but I generally warn people they’re great if you’re a hobbyist and want to control every aspect of a device - but they’re Wi-Fi and also you will need to tinker. Good solution if you like to put things together for yourself - a lot of work upfront and my completely nonscientific opinion of the general issues I see posted here - will be as stable as your network is. Good network will be fine - bad network, world of pain.
This is changing with Matter over Wifi - but read the forums here - Matter is still very early spec and making it work - consider early beta, so tinkering. LOTS of tinkering. I’d give it another 6-12 mo from now, June 2023 before I’d consider ready for ‘just works’. Doesn’t fit your use case - YET.
Zigbee - you already stated your desire not to use - OK both Zigbee and ZWave are in pretty much the same state. If you can manage to get your mesh stable and keep from messing with it, it will stabilize. Both will take ‘tinkering up front’ but not to the scale of ESP32 - after its installed if you do a good job it can become hands off. Zigbee seems more susceptible to outside interference for me so if Im going long term stability - it’s ZWave.
You’re coming out of a period of shortage for SI Zwave chips - so everything in that space is price inflated or hard to source right now (This was the source of Inovelli’s stock issues, and a lot of the reason behind them adopting Zigbee as well AFAIK)
If I were in your shoes, If stability and lack of tinkering were priority…
I’d try to get the Homeseers replaced if I could (Doubtful, even Jasco’s warranty extension was +5yrs) And if not - pick one premium brand Zwave (Ive no problem with the newest Jascos - they’re just more expensive than I prefer, and Zooz support has been pretty good. I have a mix of new Jasco, Inovelli and Zooz and it performs well.) stick with it and repllace the HS switches as they fail until Matter becomes more mainstream then start building out a Matter/Thread mesh. Only buy a room at a time and go slow making sure everything works before moving on. Buy as devices are on sale. Then you’ll be able to do Matter Wifi, Matter Thread and Zwave.
All that said - I’ve not even gone into the maintenance of HA itself. You WILL have to update. Even adopting a conservative update strategy - lets say every third or so build. You will have to devote some time to it on a weekend. Even if you decide to move away from HA and adopt something that’s supposed to be more ‘consumer friendly’ like HomeKit or SmartThings - you STILL will need to do periodic maintenance. We’re just not quite to ‘Set it and Forget it’ in consumer IoT land.
Thanks for the thoughtful reply. It turned out that I had 10 “dead” z-wave nodes. 8 of these nodes became undead after me manually clicking ping on the device page. The two that I thought were dead stayed dead. I was able to recovered them. What’s strange is that neither responded to the standard reset instructions of triple tap up and triple tap down. I tried to do an inclusion on the switch as a hail mary and it worked. So I tried the same thing on the dimmer and it spent 15 minutes discovering and eventually added it but reported dead. I excluded and tried it again, same thing. I tried a third time and the discovery phase lasted about 30 seconds and came back reporting success and the light did respond to commands after that.
What’s strange is that both switches are in multi gang boxes with other similar switches and both boxes are reasonably close to the z-wave USB stick. To my peon brain, it seemed like a networking/topology issue but I don’t know why that would have been. I don’t know how these devices connect to one another or back to the controller but my guess is a node of my network went down and everything behind it failed.
I have to agree that Homeseer is very unreliable now.
I have 52 switches and I constantly have issues with them. Either the switches wont add S2 dsk pin the first 3 or 4 times, or they go unavailable, or even they stop working at the switch. I have a whole house surge protector and the switches have been replaced over the past six months. I also have Zooz switches and have not had a single problem in two different homes. I dont get it, the failure rate is a good 75% over 4 months and 100% over a year. Dropping another $2,300 on switches is discouraging to say the least, let alone having to reinstall them.
I would love to blame myself for the troubles but just dont see it. Wiring is good, has neutral and ground. These issues spread on all models of Homeseer Light switches. I’m at the point once I swap them out, I’d send them back and let them dispose of the junk. Sorry if it sounds like a rant but its just frustrating.