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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
I have the zwave motors and the only problem I’ve experienced is that the remote sometimes won’t control a blind that’s in a multi blind group on first press. The second press works. That’s a remote issue, because I can send zwave commands all day long and they work flawlessly.
Sorry to hear you’re not having an optimal experience with Zigbee motors.
Thanks for posting your experience. I am currently trying to determine the best path and would generally default to Zigbee given all else being equal. Fortunately, both Z-Wave and Zigbee are very reliable in my home so it’s just a matter (no pun intended) of picking the one that would work best. I am wondering if grabbing one each of the raw motors to test with before ordering isn’t my best option…especially upon finding out that they can’t be swapped like the website implies.
I wouldn’t even bother with zigbee, save the headache and go z-wave. I went with z-wave based on reviews and the fact that battery will last longer than zigbee. I’ve had issues with other zigbee devices, so didn’t want to take the gamble just to save $26 per. The z-wave roller blinds have been working great so far. I’ll likely buy a some of the cell shades next, they’re addictive.
Thank you for posting this PSA. I bought only 1 blind, even though I’ll eventually want more, to see how it worked. I also got zigbee and had major issues with connectivity, despite the device being extremely close to the hub.
I thought it was the antenna or the hardware. So they sent me a new motor to test things out, however it was no better. I didn’t even bother looking into seeing if I could replace and swap it.
It surprised me that you can’t swap them out, if they sent me a motor to test the connectivity on? What if it was better? Would it be hard to swap? Doesn’t matter, zigbee sucks.
That was a year ago, and now I’m looking to buy another, bigger, more expensive blind that is further away. I came across this PSA and will not even bother with the zigbee. I’ll go straight to Z-Wave. Thanks for posting this, I totally concur!
Popping in here as I’ve had many of the issues explained in the PSA… its a bit of a PITA as I have 20 of them installed… (only me to blame lol)… but anyways I’ve posted a bit about my issues here Smartwings Z-Wave roller blinds lag/erratic behaviors but wondering if anyone has already tried their new matter motor to see if the reliability is better
Have you found any way to do a z-wave association? I have this with my existing Graber z-wave shades and the remote. They are first included to my Z800LR stick net and then I associate my Graber remote with the shades. I’m pretty sure you can’t associate shades to each other so you would have to have an external z-wave “controller” that would send the group a command. Very similar to how zigbee binding works (kinda sorta). What I don’t know is if the smartwings software supports z-wave associations
OK, several weeks on and I need to update my assessment.
Now, I can’t count on all 3 opening or closing at the appointed times (AM and PM). Usually 1 or 2 don’t work each time. On the rare case, all 3 do open or close.
I reached out to Smartwings who basically said put the coordinator in the same room. Well, for most of us that is ridiculous and impractical advice. So I did re-pair each shade via a zigbee plug in that same room that is 100% reliable (as is my overall zigbee network, other than the blinds). No improvement.
So, beware Zigbee with these shades. And if anyone has found any solutions or has any ideas, please let me know.
Just another update. I did move my coordinator into that room. Something I had contemplated doing for a long time, so the coordinator was on first floor instead of basement. It has made a world of difference. I have only had 2 missed openings (1 blind each time) in past two weeks. And none in past week. So, for me, at least, the rest of this story is if you go Zigbee, be sure to have them close to your coordinator!
Yet another update (about a month after the one above): My blinds were now down in the 50s% charge level and were becoming erratic again. Charged them all back to 100% and reliability has returned.