I started with z-wave a couple of years ago, after I’d blown away my initial, “I just want to know if the mailbox is full” try-out of HA. It was awful. Press a button then 4 seconds later a light might come on. I hear it has improved leaps and bounds since then.
Either way, that burn caused me to go wild about wifi. Multiple Ubiquiti AP Lite’s (1/6/11) for ridiculous coverage and # clients for ~$100ea AP + petty cash for ESPHome… mania. Counted them today (after deleting a few) it was 42. I shit you not DT.
They work very well. I even made sleepy solar/battery gate and mailbox monitors. They worked pretty reliably.
Mostly.
The lane gate and shed were ok (aside from problems making the feckers go to sleep when kept open) but the mailbox was also like 0.3% temperamental, requiring a manual reset every year or so.
Not good enough.
So I gave zigbee a go.
I bought one of Tubes Ethernet connected CC2652P2 coordinators on freakishly fortuitous advice from trusted folk on Discord. Then he brings out the PoE version right after! FML. Don’t bother following the links. They’re probably sold out. Anyway, one of these later I was…
A little worried the zigbee was going to mess with my lovely wifi.
Needlessly.
I guess the thumb-sized zigbee devices’ short screams into the void on the skirts of my wifi channels are reasonably well recovered by spread spectrum technology developed by our very own CSIRO (though now they seem to be more occupied with the drop-bear palague).
Colour me impressed.
One coordinator in the centre of my roof cavity covers my house. Up and down stairs. And the yard! To the edges of an urban 1/4 acre at least. And I have a tin roof.
The worst link quality sensor is the sliding door contact sensor from my man cave bar to the under deck area. It’s behind a foil backed cell blind (light blockout for the adjoining man cave cinema). It has a link quality of 0 most of the time. And it has not missed a single open/closed transition. As it said up there:
Colour me impressed.
If the tiny button cell batteries last more than a year I’ll be in front of the previous mailbox maintenance.
TBH, I have and still use all three protocol and I haven’t had any real issues with any of them.
My zigbee stuff acted up for a bit a couple of years back but that resolved itself just as mysteriously as it started and I haven’t had any issues to speak of since then.
My zwave stuff is ridiculously reliable. So much so that I’m hesitant about moving from ozw1.4 to zwavejs.
My wifi stuff is either sonoff or shelly for switches and a bunch of nodemcu boards for sensors. And I haven’t had any real issues with those either.
It’s interesting how much different people experiences are with identical technology.
My experience is like the same.
Actually i do choose mostly like this:
Can it be powered by mains? I go WiFi, mostly Sonoff and MiLight/Miboxer stuff. Works like a charm.
It must be powered by battery? I go Z-wave. Have some Hank buttons, a Hasemann DIN rail relais board, Fibaro Motion eyes. All is super reliable, never miss a command. Running Z-wave JS for two months now with no issues after migrating from the deprecated Z-wave integration, which worked fine too.
I have no any Zigbee stuff, so i can’t comment on that.
I was in the same boat until a couple of weeks ago. My Z-Wave network is rock solid (any some of my devices are about 8 years old from back in the Vera 3 days) so I was hesitant to change anything. I will say that my kitchen light automation (Z-Wave motion sensor and dimmer) seem to be slightly slower on Z-Wave JS than they were on Deprecated Z-Wave but probably only milliseconds. In general though I can turn a light on/off via the HA GUI and it changes the light in the blink of an eye, so I’m pretty happy with that speed!
Nothing against Z-wave, but allow me to put in a plug for Zigbee.
I’ve drifted away from WiFi wherever possible. More complex setup, third-party cloud requirements and arbitrary vendor firmware updates which break things… I just find Zigbee devices to be plug-and-play and trouble free. They build their own mesh network that’s more robust than my own WiFi without the need to reserve IP addresses or add new routers.
My plan was to also try Z-Wave, but Zigbee has worked out so well I just haven’t gotten around to it.