Currently I’m using linear/gocontrol dimmers exclusively in my current house. They have worked flawlessly for me for many years. Getting ready to move into a new house shortly, and I’m looking at what the current best options are today. I’ve read up quite a bit on the options out there these days, and it’s clear that being able to easily perform an OTA via USB stick without removing from the smartthings network is a benefit. I’m leaning towards zooz switches and dimmers, as they are updateable, zwave+, and have instant-on. They seem to be actively maintaining their line of products where some of the others are out of stock and unavailable at this time. The ability to use regular switches in 3way applications is interesting, and should I want 3way with dimming at remote switches, the “dim with me” solution, plus one of the linear wireless ad-on switches, should work just fine.
Am I looking in the right direction? Should I be looking at something else in the market? Thanks in advance for your expertise.
I currently have a Zooz switch. It works with no issues. You have to have access to a neutral wire to make it work with the existing switch.
I also have a Homeseer switch as well. It requires you to have a dummy switch from them and is more expensive.
Both switch work great with the way the lights come on and off. The Homeseer seems to have more sturdy feeling. That may be the extra cost. Both work great though.
Thanks - Have you performed a firmware update at any point with either of those two? Most of the threads I found were people working through issues with the Leviton firmware update and many were removing the switches and updating offline before adding them back.
Because SmartThings doesn’t support OTA from the hub, most of the time you’ll need to exclude a product to update via OTA until they add the OTA capability. The HomeSeer Z-Flash (paid software) seems to have an option to update device while in a secondary controller mode (described here) but we haven’t tried it with SmartThings. You’ll still need a Z-Wave USB stick to perform the update until SmartThings supports it. You can read more about updating Zooz products via OTA here.
Feel free to get in touch with us (Zooz is our in-house brand) anytime with additional questions about the products. Good luck with the project!
Thanks! @TheSmartestHouse I have a little bit of time to decide on my final design. I just missed the presidents day sale, but I think I’ll grab a zen26 and a zen27 next time they are on sale and just give them a try in a test case. If they work out well, I’ll move in that direction for the rest of the build out. Thanks again for answering the questions above.