Best ZWave Switches?

[rscott]

A few years back I started playing around with the zwave technology and found it fun, but semi-unreliable. I purchased cheap switches which I am guessing might be the problem. It's been a while, and now I'm moving into a new house and am wondering what type of switches seem to be the most reliable and fast.

Thanks for any tips.

R.

 

[Dogman]

A few years back I started playing around with the zwave technology and found it fun, but semi-unreliable. I purchased cheap switches which I am guessing might be the problem. It's been a while, and now I'm moving into a new house and am wondering what type of switches seem to be the most reliable and fast.

Thanks for any tips.

R.

I have had very good luck with Leviton VIZIA RF+ switches and modules. I have had my network running for about 14 months and it has never missed a command. I use a ELK M1 with a VRCOP-1LW serial interface for controlling the network and it works great. The only thing I am not crazy about is the Leviton remote. It works great and it does have special features for troubleshooting and network optimization but te display is very small and hard to read for my tastes. The interface on it is just clunky as well. I ended up buying a NEVO S70 universal remote to run everything so that is no longer an issue for me. Some people don't like the action of the switches since they are not typical rocker switches but push on push off. I wasn't sure about that at first but have decided I actually like it better now. Leviton also has a 5 year warranty which is longer then all others I have found. I have had one dimmer fail and it was no issue replacing it. I have also heard very good things about cooper z wave equipment and they use a more traditional rocker switch. I think prices between Leviton and Cooper are comparable but have not looked lately.

Lastly I lot of people are migrating towards the new Lutron Radio Ra2 since the pricing on this new system is more in line with z-wave and Lutron has always had bulletproof reliability. There are a lot of recent threads here about it on the forum so check it out .