In the past few weeks I’ve been extremely impressed with some WiFi & BLE purchases (Shelly, Yeelight, Mi Flora, Tiles), to the point at which I’m seriously considering starting a long migration away from ZWave and Zigbee.
I find their advantages to be mainly 3 things: MACs, IP addresses and no goddamn pairing!
Like right now, I have to pair a ZWave light bulb to my network again because I restarted HA at one point while it was out of its socket and it just vanished! zwcfg.xml corruption seems to really be a thing (and has happened to me at least 3 times in the past few months) and while I could go back to a snapshot and presumably have it back, I can’t help but wonder how nice it is to have reserved IPs or permanent hardware MACs, which can’t simply go up in a puff of smoke just because I manhandled HA for a few mins…
I was never a huge fan of Bluetooth, but have been very impressed with BLE, which really does seem to be a completely different thing reliability-wise.
I’ve also looked into the world of wires with sensors attached to a Raspberry Pi and that also seems to be a pretty good idea…I mean, BLE and WiFi don’t create mesh networks, but if you can just stick a cheap Pi in every room in the house, why should it even matter?
Thus, I ask: except for the situation in which you’ve already invested a lot of time and money in ZWave/Zigbee, as of April 2019 what is their value proposition over a 10$ Shelly/15$ Xiaomi BLE temperature+humidity sensor (with LCD display!)/25$ Yeelight RGB WiFi bulb?
BLE is meant for extremely short range, low energy connections. For instance, my hearing aids use BLE to connect to my iPhone
Zigbee and all smart home Wi-Fi devices I have seen operate only in 2.4 GHz That is the same unregulated space so prone to interference from microwave ovens, wireless phone handsets, and many other things. In addition, in the US, 2.4 GHz Wi-Fi has only 3 non-overlapping channels out of the 11 (1, 6, 11). I have a neighbor who is using channel 7, for instance, so I try to use channel 1 since they are interfering with 6 & 11
I am just starting out but am leaning toward Z-Wave, personally. I thought the Z-Wave binging happened on the radio. I have a zwave-zigbee USB stick and have had no issues like that,
I was also considering such a move, but it still seems to be a relatively opaque gateway & pairing-focused system - for example, if my server & Conbee stick just die tomorrow and all I have are my VM backups (not sure yet how I can back up my Windows instance of DeConz), would I be able to simply slot it new ones without re-pairing everything?
If my router dies tomorrow, I have an Excel file with all my MACs and IP addresses and would be back up and running in a few minutes…
@anon34565116, I realize that aspect of BLE and am not asking for more than 5m range without walls, which is why I’ve been considering a PI in every room…as for WiFi interference, I’ve heard very good things about the tweaks you can do on Ubiquiti access points in order to have everything running smoothly…ideally, though, I’d like wires, which is why attaching sensors to a PoE Pi sounds pretty good at the moment.
I’m reviving this topic…
I’m personally not a big fan of wifi devices, just because they might impact my wifi stability.
I’m getting annoyed by zwave device, because after a couple of years I already have 2 switches not working anymore, and in order to replace them I have to find a device that is compatible with my Vera Plus (ok, I now I should migrate, but this is the point: is it worth?) and spend a lot of money for those.
On the other side I’m exploring zigbee where I can find cheap chineese devices (from 1/2 to 1/3 of a zigbee), or several huge companies (like philips hue, Legrand, etc…) that are supposed to be good quality products.
Zigbee stuff from Xiaomi and IKEA has been rock-solid for me, as has WiFi stuff…I did invest in a proper Unifi networking system, but it provides benefits for everything, not just the smart home.
As their batteries die, I am phasing out my ZWave devices and good riddance to them all…way too expensive and troublesome in 2020. Like, what possible benefit does a ZWave temperature/humidity sensor have over a 7 EUR Xiaomi Zigbee one?
