I am looking for the lowest priced 15A energy monitoring plug that doesn’t block the other outlets and has a good range and reliability and I don’t have to flash anything and I don’t have to rewire an outlet. I would use Shelly 1PM with MQTT but I don’t like the idea of having to place it inside the electrical box since I would feel obligated to remove it if I ever sold the house and don’t want that hassle.
Here is what I have looked at or purchased:
I purchased two Zooz Z-Wave Plus Power Switch Zen15. One has poor range. The other is phenomenal, so far, but I don’t want to have to go through more plugs with poor range. Has anyone else had this problem?
Aeotec Smart Switch 6, Z-Wave Plus. More expensive than the Zooz Zen15 but hopefully a much better range. Added advantage is the aesthetics of not having a long cable and attached disc like the Zooz Zen15 does. Does anyone have experience with these?
Wemo Insight Smart Plug with Energy Monitoring. Priced lower than Aeotec Smart Switch 6 but more expensive than the Zooz Zen15. I would prefer not to add more Wifi devices but if this works and Can I see the power usage in HA with the Wemo Insight? I guess this one is out of the question after all since in the case of a power outage it defaults to off instead of the previous state.
Fibaro Z-Wave Plus Wall Plug. Very similar to the Aeotec Smart Switch 6. Slightly more expensive than the Zooz Zen15 but cheaper than Aeotec Smart Switch 6. Does anyone know if these are compatible with OZW in HA?
Peanut Smart Plug: Power Monitoring Switch. Zigbee based. They are reliable and useful as zigbee repeaters. These are bigger than I am looking for though. I have several, that I upgraded, using a Homescreen router with Almond 2015 “AL2-R109” firmware, and I use them for big appliances that don’t share outlets such as the dryer and fridge or where I have everything hooked up to a single power strip but not where I need the other outlet or outlets to be free.
So I guess it’s really down to Aeotec Smart Switch 6 or Fibaro Z-Wave Plus Wall Plug if they don’t have poor range and can be used in HA through OZW. If not, I’ll have to try my luck with some more Zooz Zen15. Any comments, suggestions or recommendations?
I have a number of fibaros, and they work perfectly. Small enough to not block neighbor outlets, and I have never had any range issues. But I have about 50 zwave-devices, so I guess the network is pretty healthy anyway.
Have not made the switch to ozw yet, but since they work in the old zwave-stack I don’t expect any issues with that.
I get confused sometimes about the terminology and setup. I used the native HA integration for Zwave plus using a Nortek GoControl HUSBZB-1. I see at the bottom of the Zwave configuration the OZW Log so I assumed it is OZW for the integration. I’m not sure that’s the case after all. The other Zen15 went dead the day after I had posted this. I guess the range of Zwave plus isn’t as great as I was hoping. I ended buying the Aeotec Smart Switch 6 based on the return policy of where I bought it. Initially it couldn’t reach the other end of the house either even with the two Zooz Zen15 in between but now it can. The Zen15 that I initially had trouble with doesn’t have the response time that the other does or of the Aeotec Switch 6. I have a 10ft USB extension cable between the RPI4 and the HUSBZB-1. Now I have an issue with the Aeotec Switch 6 not reporting power changes immediately.
I agree that it can be confusing. And sorry for adding to that by simply writing “ozw” rather than “qt-ozw”.
There are currently three(?) viable zwave-implementations you can use with Home Assistant.
The “old” integrated version which runs directly in Home Aasistant as an integration
The “new” QT-Openzwave which is a standalone application that communicates with HA using MQTT
And confusingly enough - another “Zwave2MQTT” - which functions basically the same way, but is not as tightly integrated as QT-Openzwave.
They all use OpenZwave for the actual zwave-handling. The old integration uses an old version of Openzwave (1.4), and will not be updated much (if at all).
The new “official” way forward is to migrate to QT-Openzwave, which is currently in Beta, but works fine for most things.
It comes with the latest OpenZwave (1.6), and as such should even work better with most devices than the old integration. However, not everything is converted yet, and also some stuff is missing from the communication between the external “ozwdaemon” and Home Aassistant.
I just mirated my 50+ nodes to the new QT-openzwave yesterday, and all my devices work as expeced (mostly Fibaro and Aeon, with a few other brands thrown in just for fun…).
YMMV.
I never went with Zwave2MQTT because I had hard enough of a time learning how to get my setup like I wanted it without the extra headache of having to learning MQTT. I liked the idea of being able to use the integration and the simplicity of it and being able to use a single dongle for both Zwave plus and zigbee. But I wonder if my Zooz Zwave nodes would respond and update faster with something like Zwave2MQTT or QT-Openzwave. However, I use Hassio on an RPi4 and am under the impression that I can’t run docker on it. Is docker just for PC based setups? Does QT-Openzwave need docker?
I got my Aeotec Switch 6 to report changes immediately. I had to change parameters 101 and 111 as outlined in the post at here.
Did ever update the firmware on your Zwave devices or did you just use the firmware that came with them?