Here I am browsing Amazon to buy smart switches and plugs, not sure what to buy…
Im an electronic technician, got a few Raspi already and now added Pi4 Hass via SSD. I have a robust Unifi network, I already have Lutron, Insteon, Sengled Hubs with very few devices each and a few TP-Link. No Z-wave Zigbee. yet. I get by in Studio and yaml but I hope to stay “core” if I can and not too much “Hacks” but I did a few dev/api accounts for… cant remember for what…
No ESPhome yet but I am very familiar with ESP8266 - ESP32 and I will use this for environment, motion etc
So I’d like to pick one brand of switches and plugs to grow my system… (I loved Insteon look and their keypads but supply remains an issue.)
While I am not a hardcore “run local” it will be my preference moving forward. Not afraid of flashing/tasmoda. Not looking to buy the least expensive but dont want super expensive option either.
Any suggestions on how to move forward will be very appreciated.
Hi there, where are you based? US, EU? I am based in EU-Greece. I use Philips hue plugs only for fixtures that are on-off (i.e. Christmas lights, or some deco light strings I have) for anything else I use the Sonoff S26 ZigBee plug (I think the model is different for the US). It’s 1/3 of the price of Hue plugs and it works like a charm, no dropouts. For switches I can’t be helpful to you since all of my lights are Philips hue so I use the Hue Switches that are wireless, I don’t think you are looking for something like this when you say switches.
Yes Sonoff can be flashed with both. Personally I use the Sonoff Local Integration and I am very happy with it, no need for flashing Tasmota or ESPHome for now.
As for Hue I think that it’s only worth if you decide to go full Philips Hue with your lights. I work as a lighting designer for Theaters, Concerts and TV Shows so I compared hue with professional Broadcast fixtures, the Color Consistency (CRI) Is out of this planet for a consumer product!!! I wouldn’t go for anything else for my lighting system. But there is a downside, as always…Philips Hue are FREAKING EXPENSIVE LIGHTS!!!
In my opinion it’s not a question what brand of devices should you buy. It’s more what type of network protocol you are planing to use with your devices. Will it be wifi, zigbee, zwave, bluetooth.
I prefer zigbee. Yes some will say it’s more expensive than a wifi, but it works for me better than wifi devices.
When you decide what protocol will you use with your devices than it’s relatively easy to pick a device.
And matter is actively developed so you could also check that.
I have been happy with Shelly plugs US so far (have had them ~1+ years).
Migrated from Insteon switches to Belkin Wemo. Not a fan of the Wemos. I have already had some failures, I don’t like the app to configure them, they persistently “phone home” to some server outside my network (I have a firewall rule to block them), require a neutral, and take up a lot of space in the switch box. They work fine but I will consider something else for switches next time.
Thanks Daniel,
So far I have not used Zigbee or Z-Wave in a meaningful way.
I got a few devices over wifi and its been good. In fact your question makes me wonder if wifi would be my preference since I have a robust unifi network, an IoT SSID and good understanding of networking whereas Zigbee and Z-wave would be an addtional learning curve.
To your point, my preference would be Wifi devices.
Thanks Mark for the feedback. I’ll keep your Wemos experience in mind. Btw, I found that Insteon is back selling their keypads. But shipping and import fees in Canada are more money than the device itself…
Thanks
I suggest you start looking into expanding the Zigbee network.
WiFi is good, but if your range is a problem in some locations, then it becomes expensive to add extra WiFi access points. With Zigbee you just add a zigbee router, which most mains powered Zigbee devices have, so a Zigbee smartplug would often work as a router also.
You also have to take into account if you want metering on those smart plugs and switches or just the on/off function.
As you have a good (already deployed) WIFI network I would advise against the use of Z-technology. Not only they can (they shouldn’t) interfere with your 2,4GHz WIFI but it just makes no sense to “build” a new “parallel” network if you have already a solid WIFI infrastracutre.
Specially this Z-Stuff typically costs more (often like double or trible) than the typically WIFI solutions. Beside if your hardware is ESP based you can completely own it (not only the hardware part!) - something that this Z-Stuff doesn’t offer to my knowledge.
Indeed. I like this kind of (no touch!) wall switches here.
I only install the 3-gang versions (EU) even if I only have one output simply because I control the software side completely via esphome and can therefor trigger anything with it (can even use it as a hidden keypad to disarm an alarm for example with the correct button combo)
The issue with WiFi based devices is that you can not be sure they work with HA, unless you can flash them with ESPHome.
There is really no standard for WiFi devices, so you might buy some and they work, then next week buy some and the vendor have made changes, so now they don’t work anymore.
The devices that work might be updated without warning and then the device might stop working. Search for Kasa switches and Home Assistant for an example on that issue.
The benefit with having a ZigBee network and a WiFi network is that they can run independently from each other and ZigBee is a lighter protocol.
If you transfer lots of data on you WiFi network at times, then there will be dropped packets. Some will just be missing and others will be resend, which is what is depending on the devices. That means at best you will use more power on devices, which mainly affect those running on batteries, or worse the state updates will be missing from HA.
The lighter protocol will of course benefit battery powered devices.
I don’t know any wifi devices, beside shelly, that can work with out a cloud and all of them should be paired with mobile app, as I know. Paring and reparing wifi devices can be paint in the a* and I really dislike, to be the polite as I could, devices that I have to pair with my mobile phone. Every device have different app and in the end of the day you have a ton of mobile apps just to pair devices.
On other hand a lot of wifi devices requires 2.4 GHz connection on mobile phone for pairing. I use both 5 and 2.4 on my local routers and my mob is of course using 5G and this makes difficult to par wifi devices. And many wifi devices doesnt support mqtt.
The other day one of my remaining wifi tuya switches unpair. I can’t pair it again and I don’t wanna waste my time on it.
My plan is to trash it and replace with zigbee counterpart.
There is really plenty of them. For example all the stuff athom sells is esp based and preflashed with firmware which allows local control like esphome or wled.
Also sites which lists esp based hardware which can be owned to the maximum show plenty of supported devices:
Having your hardware based around esp’s allows maximum customization and enables to get the maximum out of your hardware. Often super useful functionalities can be earned only by adding two lines of yaml.
As an example @champagj could build his wall switches around this Sonoff M5 wall switches
Even sending data to the display is possible if one takes full control and ownership over the devices.
Another great scenario could be having a esp based wall switch acting as a controller for an bathroom exhaust fan connected to the local relay and receiving temperature and humidity wireless from such a little xioami thingy. The climate components available for esphome should have anybody covered for such a resilient setup which even will do it’s dedicated task when ha is not available (maybe restarting for an update?) or wifi is down because the power supply gave up
I know that athom is selling those stuff, but when you look on it, it’s pretty expensive. It’s more expensive that a zigbee stuff. In my post I was actually referring to some common wifi devices usually made by tuya or re branded tuya devices.
As sonoff and tasmota goes, the first switches I bought was sonoff wall switches. I wasnt pleased by them, so I flash a firmware on them to use tasmota. I wasn’t happy with a tasmota either.
Maybe I expected too mush of it. Switches became unavailable, always the same one. Maybe this was the ones that had poor wifi connection. It’s hard to enable some options on them without studying documentation, and some things can be enabled only in console, as I remember.
And this is something that brings me back to zigbee.
I don’t get one thing.
When I started with home assistant there was a lot of thing I didn’t know and a lot of thing I had to learn. And still learning. I made my local wifi mesh network over cheap xiaomi router. But I have a mesh wifi. Of course it will be superb to make it on unify but that cost a lot of money that I can’t spare now. It will wait. And all wifi switches that I tried even with tasmota one gave me nothing but problems.
When I switched to zigbee those problems just went away. Ok, sometimes some end device will need pairing again, usually battery powered, but most of the time it just works.
How come that two devices using the same frequency but different protocol in the same environment can behave totally different?
It is probably not using the same frequency, but instead the same frequency spectrum.
You WiFi and your Zigbee network will try to use different frequencies in the same frequency spectrum to avoid disturbing each other.
Your WiFi network will at times have heavier loads that can cause packet drops, like if you start a movie on a media player, then it will try to cache a lot of the movie in the beginning to avoid interrupts in the playing.
Also whenever a WiFi device comes online again after a longer sleep period it might have to re-establish its WiFi setting by DHCP requests (unless you run with static IP address, which is not the same as DHCP reserved addresses).
First when it has re-established its WiFi settings can it begin to use the heavier WiFi protocol to transmit data.
A Zigbee battery powered device would often be able to re-establish its network connection and transmit the data with the same amount of data that the WiFi devices require to just re-establish its WiFi settings.
Indeed you pay something like double the price because it doesn’t ship with this sh*tty stock cloud buggy firmware you are mentioning in your post
If one wants a bargain you can choose a device with esp but not pre-flashed and getting your hands dirty installing esphome
I had about the same mileage as you with tasmota. It was nice to play with it (as well es espeasy and espurna) but it was never “production” ready for my purposes and the settings/configuration spawn over different places is really a pita in tasmota.
Well, today I run about 100 esp devices and they are rock solid. All with esphome, all controlled from one central place, all (together) upgradable with one click. In summary joy forever
That’s actually both pains I don’t want and in my opinion doesn’t allow to “count” on the system to always work/be available. I don’t want to have the need of manual pairing inter/conventions (so much hurdle and wasting time) and certainly I don’t want to have battery powered stuff for my use cases. Not that the battery surely runs empty at the worst time but actually for most people buying energy packed in batteries is not only the most expensive ($/Wh) but most likely also the dirtiest sources available. At last one can’t (easily) use it’s own power generated from the sun
I also have some Sonoff switches I used Tasmota on and with varying mileage and annoying delays, especially with rapid activations, like turning on the light realizing it was wrong and try to turn it off again. This was most likely an issue with how MQTT works, but I have solved it by bypassing MQTT through ESPHome being flashed on them now and they are pretty solid now.
Great advise. This post already helped me confirm I will stick to wifi based on my current deployment. I came to realize too that in fact I did spend a fair amount of money for a robust network, hence leveraging existing infrastructure and not introduce new potential sources of interference.
Thanks for the hints. I pulled out one old ESP8266 and testing ESPHome. Sounds like the route I’d like to follow. Its wifi which is prefered for my use-case and I have experience with Arduinos. I had heard about Tasmoda and glad to hear I can skip and move directly to ESPHome based on the feedback.
Just need to find a US/Canada cost effective and available source of devices that match my needs that will use ESPHome. I played with JTAG before, event if the devices dont want to support ESPHome, if they can be flashed they will be!
Zigbee can technically interfere with wifi, but good channel selection can mitigate this to a point of non-issue, unless you’re surrounded by wifi APs you don’t control (apartment building, etc). ZWave doesn’t interfere with wifi at all. It uses a completely different frequency.
Yeah… Well, let’s say we’ll welcome you back here and advise you on migrating to the Z-protocols in the future, once you get frustrated to no end with how your wifi IoT devices (mis)behave Irony aside, don’t invest all-in into wifi at this point. Try a few devices first and see how things go. Also, it’s very important to keep in mind that wifi has a negative scaling metric. The more IoT devices you add, the more problems you may face and you may have to update your wifi infrastructure and add APs. The Z-protocols on the other hand, due to their inherent mesh nature, have a positive scaling metric. The more devices you add, the better they become. Every new (powered) device will make the mesh stronger.
Legacy 2.4GHz Wifi was never designed as an IoT protocol. It was shoehorned into it to offer a low barrier of entry for non-tech consumers to buy into early IoT.
Irony aside, don’t invest all-in into wifi at this point. Try a few devices first and see how things go. Also, it’s very important to keep in mind that wifi has a negative scaling metric. The more IoT devices you add, the more problems you may face and you may have to update your wifi infrastructure and add APs. The Z-protocols on the other hand, due to their inherent mesh nature, have a positive scaling metric. The more devices you add, the better they become. Every new (powered) device will make the mesh stronger.