I see a lot of posts about people who like their Zigbee and Z-Wave products. As I’m setting up the hardware in my home, I’m using Wi-Fi products because I already have Wi-Fi. I don’t see much difference in price. What is the actual benefit of setting up a separate network for home devices? Is there a reason that I should consider setting up one of these networks?
I’ve got about 30 zwave devices, and at first the idea of the 900mhz mesh network sounded like a really solid solution. After running them for a few years now if I were doing it again I would go with wifi devices instead.
I can see some advantages to the mesh in a house lacking wifi coverage. However I would guess most people implementing zigbee/zwave probably have a pretty robust wifi setup. But if your phone doesn’t have great signal across the entire house a lightswitch inside of a metal box in the wall is going to be worse.
Zwave is rather slow because it is designed for reliability not speed. Not that it needs to be fast but when rebooting the controller it can take a while for all of the devices to be discovered, and if a device goes missing things break down quickly, and the entire network becomes unresponsive even if there is another path in the mesh. Nothing worse than hitting one of your automations and everything hangs leaving you in the dark because one outlet three rooms over is acting up.
It does have some advantages, like devices can be tied to each other (i.e. a switch tied to a light) and they will work even without your hub being up and running (zwave controller I think can even be down).
Zwave/Zigbee also guarantee some level of compatibility/standardization. A lightswitch is a lightswitch it doesn’t matter which brand you get.
On the security front Zwave has encryption options but it slows down the network considerably. Instead of just sending out a message into the network it has to negotiate the encrypted connection each time it wants to send a message with a couple of back and forth packets. You can turn it on per device and because of the drawbacks the recommendation tends to be, to only encrypt important things like locks and door controls which isn’t great for security.
For Zwave 900mhz is an advantage (sometimes). 900mhz can be pretty busy in densely populated areas, but so can 2.4 for zigbee/wifi. If you have an older house with metal boxes for switches/plaster walls the mesh and the 900mhz penetration range may be an advantage.
In reality though I couldn’t bridge reliably to my garage about thirty feet away, and doing so made me hit the Zwaves four hop limit so I couldn’t use that bridge to connect any additional devices further out. With wifi devices connecting back to the house with a wifi bridge, a buried Ethernet cable, etc can extend the network much more reliably. I haven’t tried any of the latest gens of Zwave devices which are supposed to have higher range.
The main problem with wifi devices is that they are often tied to the cloud, but a good number of them can be controlled over just your LAN though. Each brand tends to have their own APIs/protocols though so you need to verify compatibility with your smart hub before investing.
So if you go the wifi route make sure your devices are compatible and specifically check that your devices can be controlled without a cloud connection. Especially good to look for devices like Shelly that allow flashing of your own firmware or have standardized connection methods in their own firmware (Shelly supports MQTT out of the box)
One thing I like about Z-Wave and Zigbee devices is that they can’t connect to the internet no matter what, because they don’t have the hardware for it.
- This means you don’t need to worry about them phoning home with usage data. (privacy)
- It means you don’t need to worry about them being used by a hacker to penetrate your network. (security)
- It means you don’t need to worry about them being a node in some botnet mining crypto for someone else with your electricity. (resource usage)
You’ve already got HomeAssistant to connect them to your Google Home or HomeKit account, so you can still turn on your closet light from the bar or whatever. You’re not losing anything by them not being connected to the internet directly. You just never have to worry about that stuff. Instead of having to keep 40 devices that were sold by some company that no longer exists up to date on their firmware, you just need to keep HA up to date.
All it costs is one $30 usb dongle.
I love ZigBee sensors basically because they can run years with a coin battery, and I don’t dislike WiFi devices that are connected to the power, I just put them in a VLAN with no Internet access.
Zigbee/Z-Wave/Thread are all meant for sensors. WiFi not so much. It’s easier to host more sensors on the purpose-built network types. Special consideration for Z-Wave since it uses different frequency than WiFi, which the others do not.
WiFi and batteries don’t really go together, which also puts a real limit on what you can do there.
I also thought zigbee was more open and had less licensing fees.
ZigBee devices are really nice because they are low energy, easy to set up and don’t add extra strain on your wifi access point(s). The battery operated ones last for months to years on a small button cell battery and most plug-in/wired ones act as repeaters. Also, a lot Wi-Fi devices are cloud based or require flashing to make them completely local. With ZigBee or even Zwave you are certain they have no internet access and cannot phone home without you having to put any precautions in place.
Can confirm that zigbee is much better for IOT things, I find the zigbee stuff is quicker to react to events as there is not WiFI setup. Some WiFi devices running on batterys will have lag while they get WiFi link back up.
I never that about this but this is very true, zigbee and zwave are dedicated separate radio networks. With the Thread/Matter that is very possible if it has a thread border router setup. Apple TV, HomePod, and even some Nest routers can do this.
If I already have a handful of WiFi devices, do you think it is worth it to replace them? Say, 4-5 switches. I’m planning to invest in a few more and a home thermostat. I certainly want to commit before buying a thermostat, since they tend to be a little more pricey.
Is there a greater danger of ZigBee not being sustainable over decades? WiFi will probably be available for the remainder of my lifetime because it is already so ubiquitous.
ZigBee is already so widespread that I don’t see it going away. I’d be much more worried about your WiFi devices.
While WiFi as a network technology certainly isn’t going anywhere, most WiFi-connected devices talk to a service on the internet. You probably created an account somewhere to manage your WiFi devices. So if the manufacturer shuts down their service, which happens all the time when they either shut down the whole business or abandon a product line, you will have no way to manage your devices.
ZigBee will continue working as long as your hardware does, because you control the software managing it.
Probably not worth replacing things now but you may consider using zigbee and zwave on any new devices. I have a mix of all three in my setup.
It depends, but I’d say you should definitely try it. Zigbee is so cheap (not just initial cost, but batteries also last waaasy longer and it doesn’t saturate your local network), and it’s very possible you can still build a nice mesh, maybe reusing a couple of your Wi-Fi switches somewhere else in the house if you need a Zigbee router in one of those spots.
It was never the best idea to fill your home with tiny Wi-Fi devices. Wi-Fi IoT devices are more for people who basically want to automate a couple of things, not 40. I would become mad just for the battery changes, and scared as heck I’d be toasting my brain with so many devices screaming radiowaves (and a clear slowdown of my Internet connection).
I would say unless they’re cloud based it’s not really a priority with sometime like home assistant since it allows for devices of different platforms and technologies to work together.
It’s hard to know with technologies, but I don’t think ZigBee is a big risk and since it’s local even if they stop producing them that doesn’t break your existing devices. I mean, Wi-Fi will undoubtedly still exist, but that doesn’t mean the platforms and protocols that Wi-Fi devices use will and devices that connect to the internet can be disabled by updates.
Do you know roughly how much range they can get? I have wifi sensors out like 500 feet from my house that work OK, but in my research on Zigbee most people say like 100 feet or less?
I have 8 Z-wave devices now, including a couple “long range” devices. With the first couple, I would sometimes have trouble with the farthest, battery-powered device dropping out of the network occasionally, but that hasn’t happened as I’ve added more devices. I fought with pairing the initial devices - clicking the right series of buttons at the same time as telling HA to look for devices to join - but all the recent devices have just has a QR code - scan it into HA, and the device just shows up when I turn it on. I don’t know how much of this difference between new and old is my learning curve vs better product support, but I am really happy with my Z-waves now.
Z-wave rather than wifi so I know they aren’t phoning home.
Matter sort of makes Wifi more viable, but Zigbee is a proper mesh that generally works great. The more devices, the more reliable the network.
Zwave theoretically works similarly, but I’ve found it to have way more problems.
I very briefly tried a couple zwave light bulbs with a USB zwave adapter for Home Assistant, but couldn’t get it reliable. I do like the mesh + low power idea though and played around with ZigBee dev boards previously.
I have settled on mostly Tasmota firmware on ESP8266 based devices. Lots of switches (from the CloudFree shop among others), smart plugs, and other devices. I also like to assemble my own sensor/relay boards, which Tasmota is great for. I did have to set a fixed 2.4Ghz channel on one router, and later set “IoT mode” on my Unifi network, to avoid devices falling off the network. I also have flashed most of the devices, but am happy to do that (not so different from uploading an Arduino sketch once you’re used to it).
