Recommendations for in wall zigbee and zwave repeater mesh?

I’m working on a whole house remodel and want to use both zigbee and zwave sensors throughout the house. In my current installation I definitely suffer from range issues with my sensors and I want to be sure that I have a good mesh backbone. I’ve read many posts here about the various repeaters that can be used to ensure a good mesh, but in most cases those repeaters are plugged into existing outlets. I want to build the mesh into my walls so that you can’t see the repeaters. I’m leaning towards finding both zwave and zigbee in-wall oulets and strategically placing those throughout my house to ensure good coverage. Does anyone else have experience with doing this and do you have any recommendations that you can share, both in terms of which specific outlets to use and also any thoughts on the frequency of repeater / oulet installation?

We are building new. My plan is to strategically place outlets high on the wall behind doors when they are open.

These ‘cheap’ Chinese electronics can certainly fail over time and I don’t want to go in the walls for them.

2400 ft2 plus a three car garage. I am expecting to use two of each Z-Wave, Zigbee for ZHA, and Zigbee for Z2M repeaters.

We finished a whole home remodel in March due to a fire. The whole house is 4300 sqaure feet 2 stories. I put in Zooz ZWave switches 700 Series in every switch, including 8 scene controllers everywhere there is a ceiling fan (comes in handy for programming fan controls). All of this is running on a Zooz 800 LR Stick. I also have a few motion and door contact sensors on Zwave also. Total is about 72 devices on Zwave. I can tell you have had no issues with my ZWave setup on the 800 stick. I do prefer Zwave for the light switches as IMO it is more reliable than Zigbee and you do get much more features, like being able to customize the switch LEDs to use as notifications (I do this through Node-Red)

For Zigbee, I am using a Sonoff dongle and ZHA. I have had no major issues on this one, but I have had water leak sensors in the edge areas of my home fall off the network. Because of this I have Zigbee smart plugs through out the house to serve as repeaters for the Zigbee network. I have 20 devices on Zigbee mainly water leak sensors and motion sensors from Aqara. I will say pairing things into ZigBee is dirt simple. In my use I have just had a few devices drop off on me

Since you are remodeling some other things you should think about…

Ceiling Fans:
If you have ceiling fans or will install ceiling fans and do not want to pay extra for some rando wifi enabled version I totally recommend the Bond Bridge. I have 8 fans in my house and I am able to control all of them without any issues with just 1 of these devices placed upstairs. With the HA integration this has allowed me to program the additional buttons on the Scene controller to turn on the fan, fan light, and other features. The broadlink version of this will do the same but when I was in the market it was not compatible with HA.

Garage Door:
For the Garage if your door opener can still function using the tried and true wire contact method, I recommend the Zooz 16 Multi Relay combined with some tilt sensors on the garage door. In HA you can use the two to make a single Garage Cover for a seamless setup. I have MyQ, but fortunately I have purple button and red button learning buttons so dry contacts still work. My relay is mounted to the wall using the leads from the wall buttons, and then I have the buttons connected back into the relay (I just use momentary rocker switches for a clean setup).

Door Locks:
I will say right now I am not a fan of WiFi Door locks. I strongly suggest you go with a Zwave lock but just my recommendation. I have 4 locks and went with the Yale Assure Lock 2. I was very close to getting the Alfred DB2 lock, but just did not see too many reviews.

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Thanks for such a detailed response! I will definitely be using it as I decide on all of the components in my house. I’ve also been very happy with the Zooz switches and was hoping to use them throughout my house which should ensure a good Z-wave network.

Also thanks for the Zooz garage door relay suggestion. This will be perfect for me.

For my security system, my favorite door and window sensors are from Aqara - they are reliable and from what I can tell the smallest on the market. Today I’m using Aqara plug in repeaters but was hoping that I could find a Zigbee in-wall outlet instead. What model did you use for your installation? I’ve looked around and haven’t found too many options. It seems like Jasco has a Zigbee outlet, but I can’t find it in stock anywhere. I also found an option by Smartnit which looks good, but haven’t heard from anyone regarding their experience with it and compatibility with Aqara.

I am planning wired recessed door sensors (mainly because I am building) to get away from them damn battery replacements in these instances.

Batteries have not had the life I was hoping for during testing the last couple years.

I am using the Sonoff S40 Lite. I bought a 4 Pack

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B09XMH3X3G/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_search_asin_title?ie=UTF8&th=1

I only know of ZWave outlets, we were actually thinking of going with these but opted not to as practically speaking most things I would need to control would need to be routed through a surge protector anyway. There is always the option of getting a whole house surge, but in the end the cost did not make sense for us. We instead bought a few Leviton USB-C 30 Watt outlets placed in key areas for easy charging without a brick.

I am assuming you will need to run all of this to a home base somewhere. What are you using as they relay to monitor all the contacts?

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Usually it’s part of the security system install. Mine are standard wired security Reed sensors that feed a wired security system that I the monitor with HA. (thru an Envisalink device)

Absolutely. I don’t want anything forced to the internet that is not required.

So, an overall description …
Home Assistant is on an HP Proliant DL360 running on VMware Esxi.
Backup and file service to a Synology NAS running many docker images that supplement everything else.
Camera Server is on an Intel Core i5 Core 12400F with an NVIDIA 1070 graphics card running Blue Iris with POE cameras on the secondary ethernet.
The same Camera Server runs Willow Inference Server (gpu) handling the TTS and STT using ESP32-S3-BOX-3 Espressif devices for voice to HA along with platerecognizer/gpu.

And, to your question …
KC868-A16 Ethernet ESP32 boards x 2 … currently testing on a TV Tray in my living room with wires all over and the wife does not yell at me :slight_smile:

Just as a data point, the S40 seemed the common denominator for various problems on my net.

Zigbee is fickle and what works with one device mix may not work with another. It’s hard to blame any one device, but once I removed the S40s and replaced with Sengled, all issues stopped.

This is good to know in case I start having issues in the future. I actually prefer ZWave devices but figured there where some Zigbee I can pull into the system so I really only have Sonoff, Aqara, and Third Reality devices running