HELP! - Is ZWave that bad?

[JDRoberts]

Thanks for the kind words.

I do need to clarify just one point, which is that at no time have I ever said that GE switches are “rock solid.” They are actually my least favorite big name brand. They tend to have weird and quirky device failures. And they use older commandsets with fewer features than some of the competitors. So I don’t use them myself and I don’t recommend them. But they are very popular because they are cheap, widely available, and a well-known brand name. If you like them and they work for you, that’s great. But they have a higher failure rate, probably 15%, and that is true whether you use them with SmartThings or not. They are still worth it to a lot of people because of the cost savings, but again, not my favorite brand. Lots of discussion in the forum on this:

GE Switch Failures

I’ve had two out of three GE12722 Z-Wave switches fail on me. By fail, I mean that their z-wave functionality just dies. They don’t respond to commands, don’t respond to z-wave network repairs, won’t uninstall – just dead to the z-wave world. Seems like a high failure rate. Anyone else seen this?

These days there are two other brands, both with better engineering, in the budget category that I would suggest looking at first: Zooz and Inovelli.

JMO, of course.