I am planning to transition off of Homeseer. I have been using Homeseer for over 5 years and the Z-Wave reliability has been horrible. Intermittently I lose all my nodes and have to revert to a backup to get my node information back. I am running 3 separate z-nets, main one in the house with 50-60 devices, and 2 additional znets in barns with only 2 devices on each.
Initially I was hoping to migrate my main house z-net over while keeping all the node information, but I am thinking it may be better to start from scratch given how unreliable my zwave network has been.
What route would you go? Move a z-net to Home Assistant and manually exclude and include each device? Try and salvage zwave network from z-net? Or drop the z-net for the house and go to a USB z-wave long rang device?
Does home assistant play nice with multiple z-nets? For one of the barns I am considering switching to wifi switches and just ditch the zwave network there. I have ethernet and wifi setup in the barns for security cameras. The other barn I have zwave locks so wifi would not be ideal.
I have an r730 server in the basement running proxmox with HAOS in a VM. House znet is hard wired to a more central location on the main floor. I have a mix of hard wired light switches, outlets, blinds, as well as battery powered sensors and door locks.
In a rip and replace scenario you’ll probably end up with a cleaner solution but with much longer outage as you try to port all the homeseer functionality over to HA, repair all devices, figure out the right location for the USB stick (which likely isn’t in the basement near the server), and deal with the inevitable gotchas, and the steep learning curve to get mastery of HA.
Consider a stepwise migration, that keeps the house running and gives you the opportunity to return to the prior step when you run into a blocking issue (or just don’t want to work on it for 12 hours straight)
I believe you can use Znet in HA/zwavejsui. If so, you may be able to keep Homeseer running while getting HA installed, setup and connected to the znets. Once there you can start porting over the application light control, hvac, etc. piece by piece. Once that’s done and working - decommission Homeseer. At that point if you want to get off of znet you can.
I have just migrated my zwave network from HomeSeer to Home Assistant but I’ve only 20 or so devices, so not the bigger task you have. I had 3 znets, but apparently you will only be able to use one as-is with Zwave JS. I followed the guide here: Zwave-JS-UI on Znet via docker to install ZWave JS-UI on my znets and couldn’t be happier with the improved performance and, once you get accustomed to it, the functionality of ZWave JS-UI. I followed the strategy suggested by @PeteRage above and did a piecemeal approach. I would suggest, unless linux stuff is your thing, to test run with a new RPI 3B and zwave hat and get that running first. While I haven’t any firsthand knowledge of doing so, supposedly you can transfer the zwave hat and maintain your associations. Probably best to seek out other sources to confirm this.
You should take a look at this: Z-NET Integration with Home Assistant, but again, only one znet in ZWave JS. Other posters here in the forums have described how they moved their one znet back and forth between Home Assistant and HomeSeer to facilitate their migrations.
Note that this would require devices/nodes that are LR capable. If all your devices are relatively new, this should be fine. But if you’ve built up your switches, lights, and sensors over the years, changing to an all LR model would mean replacing many devices. Also note that LR devices do not participate in any z-wave mesh - LR is a true hub and spoke approach. (Not that it’s bad - my few devices connected via LR are working great!) You can have a mixed environment, using standard z-wave mesh for some devices and LR for others.
Also - Welcome!
I am pretty sure a zwave LR hub is backwards compatible with previous generations, so I could use it with my existing mesh devices and slowly add LR devices where the range is needed. But, I think I will stick to the znets.
Thank you for that link for installing zwave js IU on znets! I read multiple forum posts talking about doing it but could not find a tutorial. I am not great with Linux but can usually look up commands and slowly get through things.
I also have an unused old zee s2 I believe I could install zwave js on and use like a znet. I think it might have older zwave chip and pi than my znets which are relatively new (but still one generation older that the newest Gen they are selling). I might convert that first and trial it in one of the barns, then move a barn znet to the main house and slowly move devices over.
On a separate note, my first home assistant win has been setting up music assistant, linking it to Plex, tidal, and a repurposed tablet running squeezebox to stream music to our outdoor speakers. So much better than phone + Bluetooth, that would frequently have connection issues and not work well with multiple phones connected.
Fellow former Homeseer user here. You will love almost everything about HA compared to homeseer, except that the Zwave support is much less reliable than Homeseer’s. The kind of diagnostic and topology info you get from zwavejs is much worse, and at least with some of the zwave adapters, you can’t even get reliable joins to happen.
There is a way to move the zwave network over to HA without resetting everything and rejoining all the devices. If you do make the change, try that, and then don’t touch the configuration! Or at least be able to boot homeseer on the controller and use their tools. The network state is stored on the USB radio, so this works pretty well.
I didn’t realize the support was this bad and ended up messing up a perfectly functional zwave network, and eventually moved everything except my door locks to to zigbee2mqtt, which works amazingly well. Once you try zigbee, it works so much better in HA than Zwave.
Good luck!
Interesting to hear zwave working better on HS for you. I am actually trying to get off HS because of zwave reliability issues!
Randomly I will lose all of my node information in Homeseer and any device that cannot talk directly to the znet stops working but those with direct connection somehow still work even though no devices are listed on the zwave network. I restore my Homeseer VM to a point a few days ago and everything works again. Until it happens again at some random point in time. I don’t know if this is an issue with my Homeseer install or the ZNETs, but I am guessing more a Homeseer is, maybe even something from far back when migrating from HS3 to HS4.
There are known issues with 700 and 800 series controllers that Silicon Labs has not resolved. You can find those threads on this forum.
From what I have found on 500/700/800, it looks like most people are recommending going with 800 despite some firmware issues.
All my znets and zee s2 have 500 controllers. *Correction, the zee s2 has 500 controller and the 3 ZNETs have 700 controllers
Now I am thinking about using the rp3 from my zee s2 and use that to setup zwave js UI with either zooz 800 USB or gpio. Anyone have a reason to go USB instead of gpio? Otherwise I will go with the gpio board for a cleaner install.
Then I will slowly move over my devices to home assistant.
For anyone else looking to repurpose znets, gen3 has a banana pi m2 and zwave 700 chip. Does not work with rp os. I am going to try armbian on it. Tried a dietpi but that didn’t work.
Someone else already repurposed their ZNet they just installed Linux then installed the standalone version of Z-Wave JS UI on top of it. Releases · zwave-js/zwave-js-ui · GitHub
I could not get the gen3 znet with the banana pi m2 to work with zwave js. I loaded armbian debian 12 on it, tried docker, tried snapd, tried directly installing zwave js ui, when none of that worked I hacked the znet install, turned off ser2net and tried all those things again on their older debian 10 install. No luck there either.
In the end I gave up. Installed zwave js ui in a linux lxc using ttech’s proxmox script and connected that via ser2net to the znet’s original configuration. Wish I had done that from the start, it was really easy. However, it is slightly less ideal than running it directly on the znet from a resource and networking standpoint. I have 2 gen3 znets running this way for out buildings now.
My homeseer zee s2 has a rpi3, so I repurposed that installing rpi linux, zwave-js-ui in docker and upgraded the zwave to the zooz 800 hat. That is running my main house zwave network, I am slowly moving devices over to it and it seems to be working fine.