What is the best and what are the differences ?
The default integration has been here for many years and it’s rock solid at the moment. Everything is handled inside Home Assistant. But it’s running a 3 year old version of OpenZwave, and it won’t be updated.
The Openzwave addon will be the replacement to zwave in the FAR future. It’s separated from home assistant and provides a number of upgrades and benefits: Latest hardware catalog, latest command classes, will have running updates, and home assistant isn’t tied to it. Meaning when you restart home assistant, you don’t have to restart your zwave network.
But be warned. It’s in beta and in rare cases requires a lot of debugging.
Just came to HA from another platform and debated between using default zwave (OZW1.4) or add-on OZW1.6. Even though it was brand new, I thought maybe it would be best to start with the add-on so I wouldn’t have to learn something new later. My experience as of this week is:
- Every z-wave device I own is in the OZW 1.6 database, which is impressive.
- Locks paired and can be locked/unlocked but there currently doesn’t seem to be any lock code management or a way to tell which code unlocked the unit.
- Smartplugs from a few vendors worked and reported energy consumption flawlessly.
- Aeotec doorbell pairs, but HA doesn’t really support those anyway, so that’s another thing (though it seems I should be able to use it through node-red).
If I didn’t have locks, I’d be happy running 1.6, but if the next release of HA doesn’t have lock code management, I’ll probably switch to using the built-in 1.4 for a while.
I’m running old zwave devices. Only half of mine work properly. Currently working through the issues but I would warn everyone to dip their toes before diving in.
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I don’t know if you mean old as in non-zwave+, but what I’ve ultimately decided I’m doing is getting another z-wave stick and running my locks on 1.4 and my outlets on 1.6, then migrating things to 1.6 as it gets better. It might be a bit frivolous, but once everything else is on 1.6, I’m planning to use the second stick to run a separate z-wave mesh for older devices (mainly glass break detectors) that aren’t z-wave+. The second stick is less than the price of upgrading even one of the older devices.
Yep, they are all non-zwave+ devices circa 2016ish.
If I move over to OpenZwave do I need to update all my configs to reflect the change for the GUI and automations to work correctly? Is there a easy way to do this?
Hi
I’m relatively new for HA. Since +/- a month I’m moving everything to HA.
I just bought a Aeotec Zwave USB Stick (Gen5+) for my Raspberry PI model 4.
And in HA, I’m using the “old” Zwave intergration.
I could pair easily my Fibaro smoke sensors. And also my Fibaro FGS-223 double relay switch (which is a Zwave Plus device, I think).
But I can’t pair any of my Fibaro switches FGS-212 (which are Zwave non-plus devices, I think)
What can I do? Do you think it will help when I move to the newer OpenZwave? Or ??