Smartwings shades, a PSA

After seeing the recommendations of some other users here I decided to pick up some smartwings motorized cell shades with the zigbee motor and I have a few words of caution.

  1. If you buy cell shades, your motor choice is permanent. While smartwings does sell replacement motors, these cannot be retrofitted to cell shades due to the way they are constructed. (I received this information from smartwings customer support)

  2. Their integration with ZHA is extremely buggy. I first set mine up with ZHA and automations were pointless because they throw Unsupported Cluster Command errors frequently and I was never able to figure out why they sometimes worked and sometimes didn’t. Any automation seemed to have about a 35% chance of working without throwing an error. This actually caused me to move my entire zigbee network over to Zigbee2Mqtt, as it seemed others were having success with that, and in the process I replaced my coordinator with a more powerful unit.

  3. Reception with these devices is terrible and they don’t like to connect to routers. While 2/3 shades I bought seem to do ok despite LQI being constantly below 100, I have one shade that is mostly unusable. The frustrating thing is that this shade has line of sight to two routers in the same room, and has the option of a third router on the other side of the room within 3m. It refuses to stay connected to any of these and instead maintains its weak link back to the coordinator. That means it falls off the zigbee network a few times per week.

  4. Customer service, while helpful and responsive, definitely seems limited in the remedies they are allowed to offer. I understand that smartwings is a business and exists to make money, and that dealing with everybody’s various zigbee setups would be neigh on impossible, but when spending the kind of money these blinds cost (my total for 3 windows was over 1200USD) I don’t expect to be left with something that cant work as intended. I originally contacted them asking if it would be possible to pay the difference and replace my zigbee motors with zwave, but was told the motors could not be swapped due to the way they were manufactured. After several back and forths that involved me doing my best to make these shades work in my house I realized they just keep coming back to the same solution: get a smartlink pro hub. The whole point of using zwave and zigbee is to not have 47 different hubs in my network closet, and even setting that aside there seems to be mixed information for the ability of that product to integrate into home assistant, much less directly to mqtt as I’m now enjoying with my z2m setup.

If I had it to do over again I would definitely go with the zwave motors for the extra $60, but at the time I didn’t have cause to expect all these problems: every other zigbee device in my home has been pretty rock solid. I have no direct experience with their zwave motors, but given the lower frequency and required interoperability/certification I believe they would have been better for me. Hopefully this information can help someone else make a more informed decision.