Zigbee HA vs. Z Wave

ecborgoyn

Active Member
Ok, I've had an Elk M1G performing Security functions for a few years.  I'm now going to attempt to sell the concept of lighting control HA to my wife.  We have a few fixtures currently controlled by timers and photocells.  Adding automation to these fixtures and others might 'sell'.
 
My current focus is on an RF solution, that being Zigbee or Z Wave.  I like the openness of Zigbee.  Plus Zigbee looks to be a great future direction with lighting manufactures like GE and Philips.  Looks like Zigbee is becoming real..
 
I'm even thinking about a second M1G for control purposes.  I'd rather not 'disturb' the security system with lighting rules.  AND the second M1G would serve as a kind of 'warm spare' for the security system.  Some day Elk will EOL (end of life that is) the M1G and having a spare might be a good thing....  Goes back to my professional life where there was always a distinct separation/isolation between control and protection.  I left room in my wiring closet and even have an empty Elk small 'can'.
 
BUT, I see no obvious link between the M1G and a Zigbee control network.  Yes they handle Z Wave, but no direct Zigbee.  OK, so maybe I just need another interface box between the M1G and the Zigbee mesh network.  Maybe a RPi or other SBC.  But then I think that maybe I just need a separate controller platform for lighting controls and leave the M1G only handle security.  Lots of thoughts.  The M1G is robust and battery-backed-up.  Yes I could put the RPi on a UPS, but I'm trying to keep the mainstream stream systems COTS and less DIY.  Both the availability and for support.  So a COTS Zigbee controller would be preferred.
 
Anyway...   Are folks deploying Zigbee HA networks for lighting and other load control?  Or is Z Wave still viable?
 
Any thoughts and discussion are welcome.
 
 
 
 
We have our own line of Z-Wave lighting products so I do have a "dog in this hunt". That said, I would suggest considering a few points to consider:
  • Z-Wave and Zigbee are both mesh network technologies and both are comparatively open, now that Sigma has opened up a good part of the Z-Wave protocol. Both technologies were developed roughly 15 years ago.
  • Z-Wave has been an 'enforced' standard since its inception, which means that Z-Wave certified products, by definition, have always been inter-operable. In contrast, Zigbee it not one standard but several (even today) and inter-operability has only recently been targeted.
  • The rate of protocol adoption in the home automation industry has long favored Z-Wave, due in large part to inter-operability. Today, there are more than 1,500 Z-Wave certified products. If you browse the Zigbee.org product listing, you'll find a combined total of 1,081 products broken down to these incompatible protocols: Zigbee home automation - 242; Zigbee light link - 285; Zigbee smart energy - 402; Zigbee 3.0 - 12.
  • Today, you can buy Z-Wave wall switches from HomeSeer, GE (Jasco), GoControl-Linear (Nortek), Cooper (Eaton), Leviton, Evolve, Enerwave and more.  For Zigbee, the choices include GE (Jasco), Centralite, Phillips Hue. Of these, GE and Centralite use the Zigbee home automation protocol. Phillips Hue uses the Zigbee light link protocol.
 
I have been looking for a zigbee HA controller for a while, and have not found any. There are still very few zigbee devices available, but Centralite makes a variety in their 3 series that also look very nice. The trouble is they are designed for OMM market and sold to cloud-based automation companies like Peq and ATT, but Centralite does not sell a controller. Their Jetstreem lighting system is also zigbee based, but it's proprietary. However it comes with a controller that can be integrated with HAI and even Elk (although the Elk module does not process button presses).
 
You may want to read some at the UDI forum about Zwave users.
Report there indicate how most Zwave brands are not compatible with each other and do not repeat the others signal properly.
 
Many Zwave device still do not report events without constantly polling them from the master control centre, and that will soon bog a HA system down. The protocol has definitely not been standard, in any sense of the word, between brands, and certain brands are to be avoided that don't play well with others, due to patents and royalties imposed by some brands.
 
Some complain of needing repeaters every X feet amounting to too many boxes everywhere being more than their operating device quantities.
 
Here testing / using Z-Wave with one HS3 / RPi2 /  Jessie / Z-Wave dot me GPIO card mounted in attic via POE and it see's all of my test Z-Wave devices fine (as does the Leviton VRCOP in the basement). 
 
I do today utilize the Omni Pro 2 Homeseer plugin to manage the HAI units (x10, UPB, Z-Wave and Zigbee). 
 
Homeseer talks directly to X10 (via XTB), UPB, Z-Wave today. 
 
Relating to Zigbee was testing with 3 Zigbee controllers (Almond + devices) and HAI ZIM in basement (all) and had no issues with any devices.
 
Tinkering here ......using this for that ....recently also had an Insteon PLM running...now in off mode...
 
LarrylLix said:
You may want to read some at the UDI forum about Zwave users.
Report there indicate how most Zwave brands are not compatible with each other and do not repeat the others signal properly.
 
Many Zwave device still do not report events without constantly polling them from the master control centre, and that will soon bog a HA system down. The protocol has definitely not been standard, in any sense of the word, between brands, and certain brands are to be avoided that don't play well with others, due to patents and royalties imposed by some brands.
 
Some complain of needing repeaters every X feet amounting to too many boxes everywhere being more than their operating device quantities.
Z-Wave is not a perfect protocol and there are some incompatibilities but "most Zwave brands are not compatible with each other and do not repeat the others signal properly" is simply not true.  UDI is relatively new to Z-Wave so their users may be running into some implementation quirks. We've been doing the protocol since 2003 and our plug-in is nearly as large as HS3! There are many many "manufacturer-specific" command classes and firmware issues to account for.
 
The biggest problem with Z-Wave is that they went out too early. That's how they got ahead of course, but it also meant that they went out the gate without a fully baked system. They've been incrementally updating it over time, but of course that now means that there are often two, three, or four ways to skin the same cat as they've added new mechanisms. And some of those new mechanisms aren't that well thought out, such as the association system. Associations and async reporting is really necessary for a high quality Z-Wave installation in most cases, but it's a fragile scheme and you don't really want to depend on fragile schemes, so it's unfortunate they didn't make it more robust. They could have, but it would have probably depended on choices being made long before with that in mind, e.g. requiring a unique id in hardware for every device. 
 
Zigbee waited a lot longer to press the big red button, and had time to get more of these things right. But of course, as mentioned, they do allow for alternative on the wire format. As usual, both good and bad. Good because without it they would have never been chosen for use in the professional arena in the places they have been. That has given them a solid foot in a much more stringent world, which means that they have to provide a solid, pro level solution, and the rest of us can benefit from that over time as economies of scale push the costs down.
 
Bad because it has fractured their market in some ways. Though, technically it's no different from complaining that two systems that use TCP/IP can't talk to each other. They use the same underlying communications mechanism, they just choose to speak their own internal languages over it. No one complains that TCP/IP is fractured because of that. It's just that some programs are designed to work together and some aren't. The fact that you can't talk to your Hue or Control4 system using a generic Zigbee HA controller isn't a sign of a fractured market, it's a purposeful design decisions by those manufacturers. They aren't really 'Zigbee devices', they are standalone devices that happen to use Zigbee for their own internal purposes. But because people know they use Zigbee under the hood, they complain that they are incompatible with 'Zigbee'.
 
macromark said:
Z-Wave is not a perfect protocol and there are some incompatibilities but "most Zwave brands are not compatible with each other and do not repeat the others signal properly" is simply not true.  UDI is relatively new to Z-Wave so their users may be running into some implementation quirks. We've been doing the protocol since 2003 and our plug-in is nearly as large as HS3! There are many many "manufacturer-specific" command classes and firmware issues to account for.
Many other HA system users, that have converted from other brands, report ISY works even better for Zwave than they are familiar with, but that is not the reports I refer to.
The reports are many brands will not repeat other brands Zwave protocols and certain signals are missing in the repeated signals.. Take the repeating device out of the loop and the protocol works just fine.

I am not a Zwave user. For years I have read of the annoying problems with it, and successfully avoided it, so far. Vera is one that stands out, reported as attrocious with Zwave, due to devices restricted by other companies patents.

With slightly less than 100 HA devices I do not have, or need, one repeater, access point, filter or other non device-controlling HA device. That is another huge complaint from Zwave users is the lack of signal distance without multiple anciliary repeating devices.

I would be sure spending 50% more for each switch, has helped the compatibility between brands, supporting the newer standards, or owning the patents. I feel many users went for the cheaper Zwave module prices, that are giving Zwave a bad name.
 
I never understand why zwave gets such a bad rap. I have been using it for 5 years and my experience has been it's the controller that has been the issue, not the devices. I started with Vera and that system almost killed my HA hobby before it even got started. Currently I am on homeseer with over 80 physical zwave devices and it all just works. It does have its quirks at initial setup, that I won't deny, but once in place, it just works.

I also don't understand everyone's push for zigbee. It's structure allows for it to be manufacture specific and lock the devices outta any other system. I know homeseer has been talking about making a zigbee plugin, but I don't understand the purpose. I don't know of very many devices that would actually work with it.

Zwave dominates in our realm of tinkerers. I can go across the street and pick up a switch at the big box store. I can also buy a zigbee device at the same store, but t won't work with anything other than their system. Zwave device options are huge in comparison as well. Zigbee does have the locked down market, but for us, they serve little to no purpose.
 
macromark said:
Z-Wave is not a perfect protocol and there are some incompatibilities but "most Zwave brands are not compatible with each other and do not repeat the others signal properly" is simply not true.  UDI is relatively new to Z-Wave so their users may be running into some implementation quirks. We've been doing the protocol since 2003 and our plug-in is nearly as large as HS3! There are many many "manufacturer-specific" command classes and firmware issues to account for.
 
hahah.  ahahahah.  hahahaha.
 
the problem is you had to engineer around their quirks, which just goes to show you how broken it really is.  for example, if i want to add a Cooper keypad to my Leviton system, it simply cannot be done without changing the primary controller from RFIT over to something more forgiving (actually will not work, not just tough to get working).  and even there it's a battle to keep everything up to date (like you mentioned with your plugin), especially if you use a hardware controller that doesn't receive updates (Cooper or Leviton are what I have experience with).
 
and of course it's true that most devices don't interoperate.  Cooper keypads will not work with RFIT, Leviton keypads barely work with anything (including HS) because everything is hidden behind manufacturer specific classes.  and all of these broken $30 devices are shit - just look at the Enerwave Scene Controller or sirens that support different classes (Aeon v GoControl v Everspring).  if this was supposed to be a true lighting system, something that can be run independent from any integration controller with drop-in compatibility between manufacturers, then they really screwed the pooch.
 
the good news, i suppose, is that basic devices - the dimmers, switches, and modules - do work with each other, and if you stick within a single platform like Vizia RF+ or AspireRF, everything flows well together. 
 
Zigbee hardware vendors haven't so much been interested in the DIY world, but that will change. As it does, the superior technology of Zigbee will be a serious advantage for it relative to Z-Wave. Of course that may also mean that we start getting half baked implementations of Zigbee from Chinese companies selling them for very low prices. And, outside of monolithic proprietary systems, maybe the interoperability doesn't hold up quite as well due to manufacturer variance in some cases. Who knows.
 
But at least the option should be there to finally have a retro-fit friendly, open (within the HA profile world that we are talking about here), pro level wireless solution. I think that would be great for the HA world. 
 
One huge problem with Z-Wave is that it's ridiculously hard to support well. In the time it takes to do a full featured Z-Wave driver, you could probably do an Elk, Omni, RA2, and UPB driver and have time left over. All of those devices are built to be integrated, so they provide simplified interfaces for that purpose. Z-Wave never was and doesn't. You are exposed to the full complexity of being a  node on the Z-Wave network, and there's a lot of complexity. Yeh, there is the VRC0P, which we use, but that's a significant compromise, and it's not a vendor supplied solution. If ZenSys had, years ago, actually taken automation seriously and used their intimate knowledge of Z-Wave to create a 'gateway controller' type of box and kept it current, it would have made a huge amount of difference.
 
And there's also the fact that Z-Wave, until just a month ago or so, was the only one of out all of those who made you pay for the right to support their system, which didn't help either.
 
Thanks for the discussion and ideas.
 
I'm hoping that Zigbee HA/LL/etc. become more open, pervasive, and interoperable.  But I wonder how Thread will influence or squelch the Zigbee interest.  Thread does have the improved network/addressing layer.  But I'm not convinced that the need for a trimmed-down IPv6 stack in every endpoint device is warranted.  The openness and DIY-friendliness of the protocols might also have an influence.
 
I'm still not sure which direction to head w.r.t. endpoints (Thread, Zigbee, etc).  $50 per endpoint looks to be about the average.  I don't want to make a bad investment and I would like to select a future-proof platform (as much as possible).
 
ecborgoyn said:
... I don't want to make a bad investment and I would like to select a future-proof platform (as much as possible).
Everybody's in that boat!  At the moment, Z-Wave is the clear winner, not because it's a superior technology but because it has the backing of many companies (large and small). It takes a substantial investment to bring a product to market and Z-Wave's industry adoption level suggests that the technology should have a decent shelf life.
 
I went with Lutron's Radio RA2 lighting for just these reasons.  Sure, it's proprietary.  Yes, it's expensive.  But it works, every-damned-time, no nonsense.
 
I've got a smattering of other z-wave and zigbee devices but NONE are in situations where THEY MUST WORK WITH NO COMPROMISES.  I had enough of that crap back in the X10 days to know better than to try and inflict that nonsense on my wife/family/guests ever again.
 
I concur the zigbee has better long-term potential.  But with Hue's moves last year it really seemed to cripple/stall movement for zigbee in the residential market.  Z-wave is a mish-mash, to be sure, but there's a lot of movement with it, from a lot of different vendors.  That's getting it a lot of traction.
 
I am still on the fence relating to both Zigbee and Z-Wave as a primary transport for lighting automation. 
 
Relating to automation  / security doo whats I prefer wired over wireless (with batteries).  Note this my personal preference.
 
I do see both ZWave and Zigbee working fine today 100% of the time with my little test Zigbee and Z-Wave networks.
 
I also see that on the commercial side of things that Zigbee is a primary choice today. 
 
As to one technology being better than another; I will not comment on that.
 
That said all of my lighting today is controlled by UPB / Powerline and I am a happy camper as it works fine for me.
 
Old X10 today (which I still utilize) has been working just fine for me using Jeff's stuff over at JV Digital Engineering.
 
Back
Top