Anyone else giving up on Z-wave? (or Vera)

Vera Controllers, Services & Devices Vera Controllers & Cameras
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#61

[quote=“MichaelCoffin, post:49, topic:200353”]I considered moving from VeraPlus to a Raspberry Pi 3B+ with HA and indeed I built out a system (32GB flash card, Aeotec Gen 5 zWave stick) with the latest Hass.io over the past week. My main reason for considering this is my Yale (Series 300) locks on Vera have a battery life of maybe 2 or 3 months (max) - even locks that are never actually used. By comparison I have this same lock on a Honeywell Lynx Touch 5100 system and the batteries last well over a year. There were other concerns as well (sluggish performance on the VeraPlus, and those damned “backups” that run every 6 minutes and fill the log file with junk), but Vera killing my lock batteries is one of my biggest concerns.
-MC[/quote]

Check your polling interval for those locks. Vera sometimes will set the interval to be too frequent. My locks where wearing down the batteries every couple of weeks. But they were being polled every two minutes (or so). I turned off polling completely for the locks, and now the batteries last almost a year.

#62

I bought Homeseer last May at 50% off for $150. $40 for the Zwave Smart stick and a few plugins at $49 each. Ya it was more to invest than my $200 Vera but I have to say Homeseer has been working fine since May. I have have had a couple issues but they were minor and were quick to fix. No system is perfect but I?ll have to say Homeseer in my opinion is much better than Vera.

I keep an eye on things here to see if Vera can catch up to Homeseer reliability. You never know I may return one day. Until then I?m more than happy with Homeseer

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#63

Oops plugins were $39

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#64

The May sale puts most of them 20% off. I checked my invoices.

#65

While I think you are overstating the latency impact as most lans introduce ~10ms or less, Homeseer has an app to slave up to 4 Veras. It isn’t as seamless as ZNet but it lets you have a hometroller+4 Veras act as a singular system. And vera edges are pretty cheap.

#66

In terms of the Doomsday Clock, I’ve been sitting at a minute or two before midnight on switching away from Vera for quite some time.

It’s just too flakey and slow. I hear so many people start saying that Homeseer is fast, and it sounds like Hubitat might be great, too. I figured I’d give eZLO an opportunity to release a firmware that doesn’t suck before jumping ship.

There are two apps I’d miss from Vera – Deus Ex Machina II and Reactor. I’m betting something similar can be found, or I could potentially run my VeraPlus as a secondary controller to still power that functionality. We’ll see how that pans out.

#67

I switched to Hubitat 2 weeks ago, and wish I would have done it 6 months ago, Everything is instant, and reliable, no more spinning green wheel for me, or 30 second+ delays for the controller to actually acknowledge a device was included, a fraction of the price of Homeseer, and 1/3 of the price I paid for the VeraSecure.

Not sure about the Deus Ex Machina II, as I never used that one, but as far as Reactor, Hubitat has “Rule Machine” that is far more configurable than that of Reactor, you would be upgrading as far as that app by switching. Not to mention Dashboards where you can completely configure your own UI, no more bright white screen with devices laid out in irritating order. They also have a “Link to Hub” app that can combine multiple hubitats, OR recently integrated it with combining the Smartthings hub, my guess is this might be expanded later to include most popular hubs.

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#68

Incidentally, I’ve switched to Hubitat now, too.

The only issue I have is the dashboard is slow to load on mobile devices. I’m looking at an MQTT linkage with OpenHAB that will resolve that.

As for DEMII – yeah, that’s really the only thing I’m missing. I’ve found some things that are close, but it’s also not something that (alone) is a dealbreaker. RM certainly replaced Reactor and a dozen other things.

I’d probably still be working on the transition if it weren’t for Vera bricking after the latest firmware update.

#69

if u wanna dump your vera secure ill take it off your hands

im gonna get hubuiat to try it out

#70

I am actually now considering taking down my hubitat. Not because there is anything wrong with it… it is actually looking like they are stabilizing quite nicely. But mostly because I do not need it anymore. I set it up initially as a test device and to play around with and ended up adding my plantlink sensors to it using the SmartThing Driver when Plantlink cloud went belly up. I am coming to terms with the fact that another great idea for a device was prematurely killed by its reliance on the cloud and am looking at going in a very different direction.

#71

I ended up taking down my Hubitat after a month and buying a Vera Plus. I was on a Vera 3 before and wanted to move on (even tho it was fine for 6 years).

I liked Hubitat for its ease of use, but it was simply not what I was looking for. It was slower than I liked for many functions including controlling it from my phone, and I kept having z-wave traffic issues would crop up that weren’t there the day before. The only time everything worked well was the first day after inclusion. After that things would just hang randomly or devices wouldn’t respond. I gave it a month and it didn’t really improve.

My Vera is set up for the most part now, and after a week its still working well. The huge difference between the two was setup time. With the Vera having to constantly restart, it takes a lot longer. It was definitely testing my patience. But since I already had a nicely working Vera3, setting up the Plus wasn’t too difficult. I opted to start from scratch instead of upgrading to avoid old “junk”.

Vera really needs to work on ease of use though. I mean I like the extensibility of Vera, but at the same time you should have the option of an easy set up if you don’t need all that detail. No matter what, Vera is complicated. I wouldn’t recommend it to someone who is new to this stuff, and who isn’t technically savvy. You shouldn’t have to learn to be a programmer to automate your devices.

Hubitat isn’t a walk in the park either, but its menu system and its out of the box functionality is really good. It just wasn’t good enough for what I wanted to do (and the traffic issues).

EDIT: I’m not trying to say Vera is better, or even that Hubitat is better. I think they’re like cars in that we choose what’s best for our needs. Choice is good. For me Vera works well for what it is. They both have pluses and minuses, and they’re not necessarily overlapping.

2 Likes
#72

every rose has its thorns, but since the beta update and extroot its been solid

#73

So far the current firmware has been good for me. I know there have been lots of problems in the past and I can’t speak to those, but so far it seems equivalent in stability to the last UI5 version I had. I’ve only had it running fully for a little over a week, but with over 100 devices, half battery powered, everything is running zippy. I haven’t had any surprises other than my own user created ones. Just for reference, my house is 2500 sq feet with basement and detached garage, and I would say all of the devices are spread among 5000 sq feet.

I can say too, some problems are attributable to actual flaky devices, but those kinds of problems are difficult to troubleshoot. I’ve had a couple of light switches gum up my network randomly in the past, but it took time to realize and troubleshoot what was going on. Replacing them fixed it. I believe part of my success is that I’m running on equipment I know is reliable, and has been for 6 years. I’m not dealing with new device issues, or things I’m not familiar with when I set up my Vera.

I’ve slowly been adding newer devices as well, and so far I haven’t had many issues that couldn’t be fixed. Overall I’ve been pretty ecstatic with it.

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#74

Were you using the new Hubitat device or an older one with the external z-wave adapter?

I now have a Vera Plus collecting dust… Would have sold it for a song.

#75

They were the newest C5 ones. Haha I have a feeling there are many Pluses out there collecting dust. My Plus has been working really well for me overall. Incidentally I have a couple of Hubitats sitting around now. I’ll keep them around for the time being as I’m still kind of keeping an eye over there.

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#76

ill buy it as a test unit

#77

<Edits: add details, link, fix typos, etc.>

I’m a hardware developer (EE and ME, work in the medical device space) and have tried most of the hubs/protocols/devices over the last 15 years. From my perspective, the missing link in discussions such as this is that the desire for reliable control recurs, yet minimal discussion exists which highlights the rock-solid, 100% reliability (in my implementation) of the Lutron Caseta dimmer/plug option for lighting and blinds when driven by a Caseta Pro Hub. I think the discussion around Caseta is lacking in these forums because support for Caseta is lacking in Vera. By itself (no Vera, etc.), the Caseta platform is as reliable as can be in my experience. I have ~30 Caseta dimmers and sockets in my house and my lighting scheme is all controlled by the Caseta hub. The Caseta app is in my opinion perfect, as it has never had a problem and has controlled my home lighting scheme for over 3 years straight. The app talks to the hub over the net, but the hub controls the lighting flawlessly irrespective of if it has an internet connection. Further, the Caseta wall switches and dimmers look very professional as do the Pico remotes, which when wall mounted are indistinguishable form an actual dimmer aside from the fact they have a 5th button in the center and sell for only $15 each. They are available in both scene controller (2 or 4 similar buttons) configs as well as individual device dimmer configs. The Pico remote batteries last 10 yrs (I haven’t replaced a single battery in my 3 yr old ones yet) and I have never lost a pairing of any of my 30+
switches/dimmers/remotes in over 3 years. It just works. Of the easily >$10k I have spent on home automation, my investment in Caseta is by and far the best decision I have made in terms of building up a collection of devices that are reliable and absolutely frustration free.

Pico remote overview:
http://www.lutron.com/en-US/Products/Pages/Components/PicoWirelessController/Models.aspx

Enter Vera: To get some more control, I.e. integration of cheap z-wave temp. sensors etc. into my Caseta setup, I have a VeraPlus using the RadioRa2 plugin which with good response time (<1000 ms) reads/writes setpoints from/to my Caseta Pro 2 hub. With the Vera I have around 20 z-wave sensors which l use to monkey with the Caseta setpoints, e.g. I have monoprice z-wave 4-way motion detectors in the garage, under eaves, bathrooms for Hum, sideyard to detect if the dog is over there, etc. to do things like switch on a fan when a 4-way says the temp is getting warm in the attic or if the ecobee3 says it is warm via a Vera plugin that does work well so far. But I routinely have devices that are not responding, and the 4-way devices are notorious for eating battery in 2 months then upon battery replacement I have to delete/re-add the device to get it to work again then I have to mess with sometimes several scenes to get that battery-replaced sensor to do its thing again. I have kept hoping the z-wave stuff would start working more reliably, but I usually have some substantial fraction of stuff not working correctly with the Vera.

For fan control, (I have 3 box fans sitting on top of the screen of three half-open skylights with an extension cord on the roof for power), I use tp-link hs110 switches which are cheaper than z-wave switches (ordered 6 moretoday at $10 each for Prime Day) and they handle inductive loads at up to 10A which is perfect for fans. Vera has a plugin for these, but it is a loose communication that does not verify the setpoint change, it merely sends the command and one hopes it is received (same as UDP vs. TCP if you know what I mean).

Some quick reading indicates the Caseta integration and also TP-link integration is better with Hubitat than with Vera. Specifically, Vera does not support Caseta Pico remotes, which are by far my preferred remote type. Thus I use Z-wave minimotes with Vera which are a continuous source of frustration. If Hubitat supports Pico remotes, which it is said to do, that is a game changer for me as that would allow me to get rid of my last remaining minimotes. I need to figure out Reactor still, and to get several z-wave devices working again with Vera-- I’m thinking to invest that time into messing with Hubitat instead.

This reply may be long-winded, but hopefully it gives the new Vera management some ideas what might be important to users.

Case in point: I just picked up a minimote and had to press a button 3 times and wait ~20s for the overhead fan to come on since the z-wave remotes are always a problem in my experience. In contrast, I have at least 20 Caseta Pico remotes around the house, and have never experienced a perceptible delay in 3+ years of use. I keep the minimote plugged in continuously to a USB charger-- If the battery runs out (2 wk lifetime), I have to delete and re-add the device and re-create scenes for it. If Hubitat works with Caseta and its line of Pico remotes as well as forum posts describe therein, I may finally be a happy home-automation camper. I’ll post a follow up after having some experience with Hubitat.

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#78

Great thoughts. I’ve always thought the problem is with the z-wave standard, not necessarily with Vera. Not to say that Vera can’t be improved, but I feel like its kind of like Apple vs Microsoft or Apple vs something else. Lutron controls their whole ecosystem, so they’re able to maintain performance standards within their equipment. I think of z-wave as more of a technical standard, but it doesn’t exactly have performance requirements across manufacturers. More and more manufacturers are making devices these days, and many of them are junk. Unfortunately the only way to know for sure if something works well with your Vera is to purchase it and try it out.

I tried Hubitat for 3 months, and for me it wasn’t good. Actually, it would start out good in the beginning, but then after a week in things would just start failing overnight without any input from me, and it would just keep going down hill. I tried several times with different strategies of inclusion and other tricks to try to make things better, but I finally just gave up. I have around 100ish devices so starting over just got old. Vera seems to work well with my equipment and setup (the first time mind you), so I’m staying with it. I came from a Vera 3 which served me well for 6 years with practically no issues, and now I’m on a Plus. Guess what, almost no issues. But for some reason putting a Habitat in the loop is no good for me. The only thing I can think of is that what I use and how I use it just works with Vera better than Hubitat. For others, Hubitat seem to work better. But if you look at their forums, they have very similar types of issues with equipment and whatnot. It just depends on what equipment you’re talking about.

For what its worth, I also had the impression that Caseta works better with Hubitat. Sounds like you’re quite invested in it, so it might be a better option for you.

I also have a mini-mote and mine works just fine. Instant response, always works, but you’re right about the battery - its terrible. Luckily mine is always plugged in. I use automation and voice control for most things anymore if I’m not pressing a wall switch.

Good luck!

#80

EDIT: The post I replied to was deleted, so I’m deleting my response to it.

#81

I seriously think a lot of the problems people experience is overwhelmed cpus. Any mesh network can have dead zones and no amount of cpu fixes that, but cpu (or tuned code) fixes a lot of “missed” commands.

Two extreme examples: homeseer and isy.

Homeseer’s smallest controller is 4x more powerful than a vera secure, with more, higher performing cpu cores, more ram, more storage. Their code (which has had many additional years of tweaking and/or cruft) can be half as efficient as Vera and still outrun a vera.

Isy, by contrast, uses a dinky 200mhz cpu but a custom real-time OS to ensure the controller is focused on the HA part, not distracted by ancillary services. It runs those services but they get no priority so they get lag but the automations are fast.

My homeseer does everything faster than vera, up to and including responding to minimotes. I use one as a snooze button on my wake up lights and I immediately noticed that I didn’t need to tap the minimote more than once on vera.

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