Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Z-Wave Alliance Announces Z-Wave Source Code Project Now Open and Available

z-wavealliance.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 125 posts

Re: Z-Wave Alliance Announces Z-Wave Source Code Project Now Open and Available

#71

Post by oceanplexian »

montjoy wrote: post #58
X-Istence wrote: post #52

I installed Z-Wave all over my house. Replaced all the switches, got the sensors, light bulbs where necessary, everything was Z-Wave... and it was a nightmare. I ended up selling the house with everything Z-Wave still in it, and the new owners were happy to have a "Smart Home" capable home, but I will never again touch Z-Wave. Once your Z-Wave network grows past a certain number of devices it becomes too chatty and d…

Sounds like you had some non-zwave+ devices or you were using a lot of s0 encryption. Both are known to slow down the network. Like everything it’s gotten better over time. The 700 series stuff is pretty quick.

I'm also running a Zwave network and it's highly responsive with around 50 devices. A friend of mine is running a few hundred devices and I haven't heard him complain much about it, all of his actions/triggers/etc seem to execute pretty much instantly. I'm going to guess that his network topology has a lot devices that are only accessible by repeaters, or aren't using Zwave+. Zwave is pretty much _the standard_ for large professional smart home installations and scales pretty well if implemented properly.

Re: Z-Wave Alliance Announces Z-Wave Source Code Project Now Open and Available

#72

Post by oceanplexian »

horsawlarway wrote: post #31
synergy20 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

z-wave is kind of competing with zigbee for low power mid-range wireless standard for smart home or smart building since like 20 years ago? then we have low power bluetooth and low-power wifi joined the party. z-wave was proprietary which did not help its deployments, but still I recall it was the most deployed low power wireless devices for IoT. I worked on zigbee and never liked it. I wish z-wave was more open back…

Personally - I got kinda the other feel. Seems like Z-Wave is slowly dying in favor of zigbee devices. I can't really even find z-wave bulbs right now. And basically any device I might want (curtains, alarms, sensors, lights, motors, thermostats, etc) comes in a zigbee form. I agree that Z-Wave did the better standards enforcement, but Zigbee went with the age old route to success: manage to be cheaper. Throw in that…

> I can't really even find z-wave bulbs right now. And

Even though you can find a Z-Wave bulb, it defeats the purpose of Z-Wave. Z-Wave isn't for consumables like bulbs, it works best for hard-wiring electrical devices into your home that will be permanently installed in a professional installation. I wouldn't feel comfortable putting a Zigbee switch in the wall since it's likely to become obsolete, whereas I'd be confident Z-Wave will still be around and supported in 10 or 15 years.

Re: Z-Wave Alliance Announces Z-Wave Source Code Project Now Open and Available

#73

Post by oceanplexian »

Lendal wrote: post #43
synergy20 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

z-wave is kind of competing with zigbee for low power mid-range wireless standard for smart home or smart building since like 20 years ago? then we have low power bluetooth and low-power wifi joined the party. z-wave was proprietary which did not help its deployments, but still I recall it was the most deployed low power wireless devices for IoT. I worked on zigbee and never liked it. I wish z-wave was more open back…

My house is standardized on Z-wave because I can afford a bit extra $ for each device in exchange for reliability. I can also add Zigbee if I need to, since my hub can do both. I just haven't needed to yet. Everything is available in both Zigbee and Z-wave versions, so I choose to pay the extra for added reliability. I haven't had much luck with Bluetooth and Wifi IoT devices. They tend to last a couple of years and…

Z-Wave also supports device associations which Zigbee doesn't. You can permanently associate devices together (i.e. switches) to create a virtual 3-way switch that will work even if the "smart home hub" is down. Which, from a reliability perspective is a much better design if you're installing something commercially.

Re: Z-Wave Alliance Announces Z-Wave Source Code Project Now Open and Available

#74

Post by enobrev »

X-Istence wrote: post #52

I installed Z-Wave all over my house. Replaced all the switches, got the sensors, light bulbs where necessary, everything was Z-Wave... and it was a nightmare. I ended up selling the house with everything Z-Wave still in it, and the new owners were happy to have a "Smart Home" capable home, but I will never again touch Z-Wave. Once your Z-Wave network grows past a certain number of devices it becomes too chatty and d…

I have ~65 Z-Wave devices around my house, and I definitely notice lag from time to time. Recent versions of Z-Wave seem to be significantly faster and I've noticed it less.

I can't say I _love_ dealing with Z-Wave. But I do like having a single protocol throughout my house. At the very least, any issues I have tend to be consistent. I'd say in this past 6-months, I've practically had zero problems. I blame that overall improvement on ZwaveJs, because some of these devices are at least 5 years old and they're just cranking away without issue right along side my more recent Zooz and Inovelli devices.

That said, I've been strongly considering multiple Z-wave hubs, each running zwave2mqtt with a central mqtt server just to keep everything as fast as possible.

Re: Z-Wave Alliance Announces Z-Wave Source Code Project Now Open and Available

#75

Post by enobrev »

burnte wrote: post #64
wesapien wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you consider separate VLANs for each type of Z-Wave hardware to reduce the broadcasts?

The problem isn't the network, it's the number of devices.

My (likely incorrect) assumption has been that my zwave stick is handling everything serially and falls behind when traffic spikes.

Re: Z-Wave Alliance Announces Z-Wave Source Code Project Now Open and Available

#76

Post by jzawodn »

oceanplexian wrote: post #71
montjoy wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds like you had some non-zwave+ devices or you were using a lot of s0 encryption. Both are known to slow down the network. Like everything it’s gotten better over time. The 700 series stuff is pretty quick.

I'm also running a Zwave network and it's highly responsive with around 50 devices. A friend of mine is running a few hundred devices and I haven't heard him complain much about it, all of his actions/triggers/etc seem to execute pretty much instantly. I'm going to guess that his network topology has a lot devices that are only accessible by repeaters, or aren't using Zwave+. Zwave is pretty much _the standard_ for l…

Yeah, I used virtually all Z-Wave switches and dimmers in our new house (and motion sensors, temp sensors, etc) and haven't had an issue. The one time things seemed a bit laggy I had to "optimize" the network, which I realized I had NEVER done until that point. All issues went away.

We have well over 100 Z-Wave devices spread over 4000 sqft.

Re: Z-Wave Alliance Announces Z-Wave Source Code Project Now Open and Available

#77

Post by X-Istence »

thewataccount wrote: post #61
X-Istence wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Z-Wave's mesh networking was a giant pain to get functioning correctly, and good luck if devices were multiple hops away... things would just randomly fall off the network. With Zigbee (IKEA TRADFRI and Philips Hue) I haven' had any of those issues, nor with any of my Thread devices.

I have nordic dev chips, esp8266's, esp32's, etc. I have some zigbee stuff with HA, and I have made some custom sensors with esphome. I'd like to try some thread stuff. How are you currently using thread/what are you using it with? Do you have any recommendations for how to get started with it now - I've been rather confused as it feels like its in limbo right now. How do you like it compared to zigbee and wifi?

My Thread devices are all HomeKit devices, and they work incredibly well. Once they are joined to the Thread network they show up as IPv6 devices in mDNS and just work.

I have a ton of Thread enabled lightbulbs, smart outlets, and sensors on Thread, and I haven't had any issues.

They seem to mesh really well, store and forward for devices that are sleepy just works, but sleepy devices waking up and sending traffic is almost instant.

I do not own any devices that use WiFi, other than my Ecobee thermostat. So I can't compare against that. I would put the Thread devices up there alongside the Zigbee devices in terms of reliability, if not more resilient since I have multiple thread border router capable devices (multiple HomePod mini's and Apple TV's with Thread) so a device getting restarted (unlike a Zigbee hub like Hue/IKEA TRADFRI) won't affect the network/ability for the devices to trigger responses.

Re: Z-Wave Alliance Announces Z-Wave Source Code Project Now Open and Available

#78

Post by X-Istence »

montjoy wrote: post #58
X-Istence wrote: post #52

I installed Z-Wave all over my house. Replaced all the switches, got the sensors, light bulbs where necessary, everything was Z-Wave... and it was a nightmare. I ended up selling the house with everything Z-Wave still in it, and the new owners were happy to have a "Smart Home" capable home, but I will never again touch Z-Wave. Once your Z-Wave network grows past a certain number of devices it becomes too chatty and d…

Sounds like you had some non-zwave+ devices or you were using a lot of s0 encryption. Both are known to slow down the network. Like everything it’s gotten better over time. The 700 series stuff is pretty quick.

I was an early adopter for sure. This was back in 2016ish when I installed all of the devices. All of the devices were Z-Wave+ (specifically bought for that) but many of them did not support the newer encryption, and it ended up being a mixed network of devices for sure. Only the last few devices I bought supported the new encryption standard that was being rolled out at the time. I ended up getting a new Z-Wave hub that supported it to be able to securely enroll my new devices... but all it did was destabilize the network further.

It just left a horrible taste in my mouth, and once bitten, twice shy is definitely the case here.

The other thing that made things slow was sleepy devices that would wake up to report status. Things like motion sensors that also reported humidity, light levels, temperature and more (I do wish I could find a sensor like that for Zigbee/Thread... the multiple things in one was kinda nice). Every time they would wake up to report it would flood the network with traffic. And with each additional sensor I would have to tweak how often that would happen (and thus how accurate the data was over time) to reduce the amount of chatter on the network.

Re: Z-Wave Alliance Announces Z-Wave Source Code Project Now Open and Available

#79

Post by X-Istence »

oceanplexian wrote: post #71
montjoy wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds like you had some non-zwave+ devices or you were using a lot of s0 encryption. Both are known to slow down the network. Like everything it’s gotten better over time. The 700 series stuff is pretty quick.

I'm also running a Zwave network and it's highly responsive with around 50 devices. A friend of mine is running a few hundred devices and I haven't heard him complain much about it, all of his actions/triggers/etc seem to execute pretty much instantly. I'm going to guess that his network topology has a lot devices that are only accessible by repeaters, or aren't using Zwave+. Zwave is pretty much _the standard_ for l…

All the devices were Z-Wave+, it was the one thing I was buying for. Not all of them supported the new encryption standard which started rolling out after I deployed most of my switches.

This was in a ~1400 sq ft house, with a little over 200 devices (motion sensors/lights/switches/smart plugs/humidity sensors/weather sensors). The network had a few repeaters the longest hop was 2 hops from the controller to the end device.

Re: Z-Wave Alliance Announces Z-Wave Source Code Project Now Open and Available

#80

Post by X-Istence »

jzawodn wrote: post #76
oceanplexian wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm also running a Zwave network and it's highly responsive with around 50 devices. A friend of mine is running a few hundred devices and I haven't heard him complain much about it, all of his actions/triggers/etc seem to execute pretty much instantly. I'm going to guess that his network topology has a lot devices that are only accessible by repeaters, or aren't using Zwave+. Zwave is pretty much _the standard_ for l…

Yeah, I used virtually all Z-Wave switches and dimmers in our new house (and motion sensors, temp sensors, etc) and haven't had an issue. The one time things seemed a bit laggy I had to "optimize" the network, which I realized I had NEVER done until that point. All issues went away. We have well over 100 Z-Wave devices spread over 4000 sqft.

That's less devices over a larger area than I had.

My house was 1200 sq ft, with a little over 200 devices.

Post reply on HN