Zigbee and Z-Wave netowork balance

Honestly given how much ‘pollution’ there already is on 2.4GHz I’d prefer ZWave, but like @bravenel has said, it’s usually down to what devices you want and what they support.

Only things to keep in mind is how far spread out your devices will be.

Zigbee has repeaters (anything plugged in, essentially) and is helpful in extending the range of a mesh.

Zigbee and zwave are both supported in ST and essentially the end user doesn’t know which is which.

Zigbee has plenty of non-overlapping channels with Wifi and I have 5 zigbee meshes in my house along with wifi on all major channels. No issues.

Zwave devices tend to be a bit cheaper. More zigbee devices are coming out every day and lowering that pricepoint.

Bottom line, no need to worry about sticking to one or the other, I have tons of zigbee and a few zwave and everything works pretty well.

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Thanks a lot. That’s nice to hear. The impression I got from reading other posts was that people tend to favor Z-Wave, but so far, Zigbee has worked out pretty well for me.
Can you recommend some good Zigbee light switches?

Switches or dimmers? I use zigbee dimmers and switches so afraid I can’t recommend zwave stuff.

The Jasco / GE stuff seems good.

Are you looking to swap out all the switches and dimmers?

Both. The previous owner had this very good setup for the 20th century which includes lots of 3-way switches, all being controlled by old incandescent dimmers. I’m not much of dimmer guy, so I’m thinking of changing everything to switches.
Will those work good with LEDs?

I have most of my switches z-wave. Smart bulbs and sensors zigbee and a mix bag of everything else such as nest, Amazon echo and ip cams. No point sticking with one standard and have less options. The new GE switches work really well with LED lights and cheaper at Lowes.

There’s a FAQ on zigbee vs zwave which might be of interest. But in general, yeah, one of thr great things about smartthings is that it lets you mix-and-match devices of different protocols, so you can select based on what you need from each device.

Don’t have high hopes on that. I was never able to make mine work. But I ended up with a much better solution. Aeon Labs meter, works very well for me. Do a quick search on this topic to find out more about laundry monitoring.

Wow. This IS and amazing community. I never expected to get so many replies in such a short period of time. I think I’ll go with a mix of both Z-Wave and Zigbee. I’ll just have to look around Home Depot, Lowe’s and Amazon for similar looking switches. I’ll get both Wink and ST compatible products and probably make the change when the v2 Hub is well tested and there is official Nest integration.

Thanks to everyone for this helpful information!

As far as repeating, pretty much any device connected to mains power will act as a repeater in both the Zigbee and Z wave protocols. That includes light switches, plug-in modules, plug-in sensors, etc. (It does not include smoke alarms, because they don’t want to miss an alert by being busy repeating a message for a light switch.)

Zigbee devices only repeat for other zigbee devices, and Zwave devices only repeat for other Z wave devices.

You can buy standalone devices for either zigbee or zwave which do nothing but repeat, but most people would rather spend the extra 10 or 15 bucks and get a dual purpose device like a light switch or a plug-in module that both repeats and functions for control of a specific device.

And the newest generation of Zwave, Zwave plus, has improved range so it’s now close to equal with zigbee. The Zwave standard requires backwards compatibility, so you can mix-and-match classic Z wave and Zwave plus devices on the same network.

I’ll give you a slightly different opinion…

What if “SmartThings” doesn’t work out for you? I’m not saying it won’t, but when choosing between mesh technologies, it would be wise to also consider how useful the devices will be if ST is no longer an option for you. In that case, what are the list of hubs you might fall back to, and what do they support?

I had this issue when I decided to give ST a try… 3 Lutron switches are now collecting dust in a parts bin in my garage.

For that reason, the majority of devices in my own home are z-wave. While more and more hubs are handling both technologies, there are still many that support ONLY z-wave.

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Ok. This much I knew about the repeaters. Are any of the two protocols faster in your opinion?

Don’t hold your breath on that one: we’ve been told by SmartThings staff in the forums that that may never happen.

Nest doesn’t like open platforms and smartthings’ whole vision is about an open platform.

Nest has a bunch of rules for its official integrations which have nothing to do with technology, and everything to do with limiting access to the thermostat controls.

If smartthings went for official integration, they would have to limit it to only specific smartapps, only specific functions, it would get very complicated and restrictive.

So we’ve been told it’s likely that the unofficial integrations that we have in the community will always be preferable for the typical smartthings consumer to any official integration they might do. And that they’re unlikely to do an official integration because of the complexities having essentially two categories of smart apps would require.

Again, search the forums for more discussion.

That’s why I’m just thinking of getting products that are ST and Wink compatible. Wink is working well for me so far, none of the problems I read about people experiencing all those issues. From the videos I’ve seen and posts I’ve read, ST tends to work faster while Wink has a 1-2 second lag (which is not terrible).
The annoying part came when I read that Zigbee devices are usually “hub-specific”. With Wink I have the option of the Tapt light switch, but it probably won’t work as good with ST or some other hub. The same with the ST sensors.

Because of this, I was leaning a bit more towards Z-Wave.

Not noticeably faster from a human perspective. zigbee is slightly faster than classic Zwave but again zwave plus has a lot of improvements and one of them is faster transmission time ,so again it’ll end up being about the same as zigbee.

If I were designing a commercial installation with a sensor net with 1500 node I would use zigbee. And I think so would everybody else.

But if I were outfitting an apartment with five rooms, some lights, a doorlock, and a couple of motion sensors, I’d use zwave for most of it.

Device for device, I usually prefer the Zigbee versions but they are usually more expensive and better engineered so it’s not so much the protocol as it’s just aimed at a different market.

You need enough devices of each type to strengthen the mesh. But beyond that I choose more by individual device and use case than by protocol.

@JDRoberts is probably a better person to clarify this, but my impression is that zigbee is a much more open “standard” than z-wave. For that reason, many vendors have made their own “flavor” of zigbee that isn’t quite standard - and so doesn’t quite work with other devices. IT’s kind of like the android OS… it’s “open” enough that samsung, HTC, motorola, and everyone else makes their own variation (which is a nightmare for app devs.)

Z-wave, on the other hand, is a more closed standard, so there isn’t the freedom to make variations. If you go too far from the spec, z-wave won’t certify the device. This is more in line with apple’s mobile OS… It’s more expensive to dev for, but your pretty much assured it’ll work with anything that has an apple logo.

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That I read recently. But have also read from in the forum from some of the ST staff that it is in the works. That would be a big no, no for me, mostly because of my WAF. I have various Nest products and my wife really likes them.

So for now, it’ll be Wink and ST compatible products and wait and see. I’m in no rush and would like to see what the new hub comes along with. Also, Nest will most likely come up with some sort of hub of their own, after the Revolv purchase.

Check the datestamps from the forum posts. I’ll bet the ones that said nest integration was “in the works” are from before March 2015, and the ones that said “they have too many restrictions, we probably won’t do it” are from April 2015 or later. Basically the more information smartthings got, the more they found out the issues weren’t technical but philosophical.

You can use nest products with smartthings, you just have to look for the community integrations.

As far as the incompatibility issues with zigbee, @garyd9 is right that zwave makes a much bigger deal out of interoperability for devices from different brands than Zigbee does. That’s actually considered a feature from the zigbee point of view because many security firms use zigbee devices and they like being able to put their own encryption layers on top of them. It makes the networks a little harder to hack.

But Zigbee knows if they want to play in the home automation space for DIY devices they need to address interoperability.

I’ve already mentioned Zwave plus as the newest generation of Zwave with a lot of improvements.

Zigbee is working On their own next generation, zigbee 3.0, and its improvements will mostly be in the areas where it was weak relative to Zwave. It’s going to have much better interoperability, it’s going to combine all its many profiles into one, and it’s going to have a much stronger certification process.
However, for technical reasons it will not be backwards-compatible.

But the fact is if you shop device by device, all of that becomes pretty much irrelevant. You choose the device that works best for your particular use case.

For example there is a Z wave four button key fob, and there is a zigbee three button key fob. The zwave one has been officially tested for smartthings compatibility. It works OK, but it’s a little expensive, the form factor isn’t quite right, and it’s just not a very popular device.

The Zigbee one is a cheap little key fob. Tiny buttons about the size of a car remote. But it’s really cheap, $15. Not officially tested, but community members wrote a device handler for it, and it seems to work just fine with smartthings. Very popular with people looking for a cheap button device, particularly to disarm a siren.

Would I have predicted in advance that there would be an open protocol zigbee device for that purpose? Nope: most of these key fob type devices are associated with a specific security system and the Zigbee ones are double or triple layer encrypted and don’t work with other brands. But one company made a vanilla flavor and vanilla flavor works fine with SmartThings. So you just shop around and see what you find.

(Technically SmartThings uses the basic version of the zigbee 1.2 Home Automation profile, but you still have to check each device for compatibility because of the encryption layer issue. )

Also note that zwave is a little less interoperable then Gary’s statement implies: there’s a basic command set which is just turn on/turn off, and it’s true that any Z wave certified device will be able to accept that command set. But when it comes to advanced features, scene control, or manufacturer specific features you can still find that some features work with some controllers and some work with others. So it’s always good to buy from a place that has a good return policy and to research in the forums before you make the buy to begin with.

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Thanks @JDRoberts @garyd9 for all this info. I’m going to start slow into some Z-Wave and go from there. So far, my Zigbee devices are working just fine within the range of my house and if anything, I’ll add some Zigbee light switch or repeater to extend.

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My house is very similar.
Z-Wave: Switches, plugs, sensors
Zigbee: Smart Lightbulbs (Cree)
WiFi - Amazon Echo, iPhones, Garage Door Opener (MyQ)
I had an Ubi hooked in, but it’s just a worthless piece of junk. Replaced by Amazon Echo.

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