We recently moved into a new house. In our old house, we had a SmartThings-based HA system that primarily managed lights and the HVAC system. The system was OK, but I ended up not being happy with it due to the following reasons:
It worked. Most of the time. This was the single most frustrating thing. The lights would come on correctly when I opened the garage door about 90% of the time. The rest of the time? Left in the dark.
Because everything was cloud-based, there was a noticeable lag before triggers would fire. Open a door, wait 1-2 seconds, and then the light would come on. (but only 90% of the time)
I refused to put any of my deadbolts on the system since that made me totally reliant on the security of SmartThings cloud infrastructure and I’m not that trusting of young, startup companies. dltutuapp.com/9apps.ooo/ [url=https://bluestacks.vip/]https://bluestacks.vip/[/url]
I’d like to check out the Vera 3 system, but am looking for some opinions on how stable and reliable it is. Also, how’s the lag between triggers and actual events firing? (second bullet point above)
Lastly, on the off chance someone here has used both systems, what am I giving up by going to the Vera system?
In case it matters, I’m mostly looking to control lights, HVAC, door locks and, eventually, our pool system. Most of my existing equipment is z-wave based.
I would recommend the Vera Plus or Edge over the Vera 3. The Vera 3 is a very old unit.
Vera will do what you have listed and so much more.
Anything wireless will have lag. As you noted, with ST, there was considerable lag with a cloud based system because it has several points to go to with the cloud and then all the way back to the ST and finally your device.
Vera is pretty good at keeping lag to a minimum but the result will depend on your wireless environment such as, is it noisy? Is there lots of blocking materials and so on so do not expect it to be perfect every time. That is just not realistic. I do recommend you automate rebooting your Vera nightly.
If you want perfection, put in a wired system.
Honestly? For set and forget, bullet-proof reliability invest in Homeseer.
Works locally, highly flexible, and in the 18 months since I’ve upgraded to HS from Vera, I’ve had not a single problem with it. This is across two homes and over 100 devices per home.
It’s hard to describe how well it works, but after having used Vera’s from back in the Vera 2 days of 2011, I can’t recommend HS enough. My last pair of Vera’s, two Vera Secure units, are collecting dust in a closet.
[quote=“jaccord, post:3, topic:200359”]Honestly? For set and forget, bullet-proof reliability invest in Homeseer.
Works locally, highly flexible, and in the 18 months since I’ve upgraded to HS from Vera, I’ve had not a single problem with it. This is across two homes and over 100 devices per home.
It’s hard to describe how well it works, but after having used Vera’s from back in the Vera 2 days of 2011, I can’t recommend HS enough. My last pair of Vera’s, two Vera Secure units, are collecting dust in a closet.[/quote]
Are you looking to sell your Vera Secure? I am planning to upgrade from VeraPlus to VeraSecure.
Right now I use one old Vera 2 and one Vera 3 as backups in each home. They’re on a 4g router on a separate network so I can reboot the main router if there’s trouble with it. One day these units will die, so I’ll move to using the Secures as a backup.
I left Vera about 7 months ago a bought Homeseer. At this time I fully recommend Homeseer over Vera. I have had no issues with Homeseer. It?s pretty much set and forget till you need to add something. The cost is more but dam it works. No more daily or weekly fixing of my Vera Plus.
I have been though Vera 1,2,3, Lite and have had a stable, reliable system on Vera 3 UI5 for years now. It would be fine to start out with a Vera 3, but I agree there is newer hardware out there and likely makes sense to get that. I recently wiped Vera and re-included my whole network and put my HA Bridge and Home Assistant on a RPi3 thinking that would free up Vera from the majority of scene logic which can be done in Home Assistant. I still don’t have much automation going on in HASS yet, but HA Bridge allows very responsive local Alexa control for all devices in Vera. So while the tinkering can be fun and Vera has given me tons and tons of value and control for 10 years now, I am starting explore/consider something like Homeseer.
I’d recommend a conduit running from the network closet (aka utility room) all the way to the attic with openings on every floor but in a closet or something. (almost like a central vac) this way you have future scalability of new technologies etc.
In my experience I’ve found my Vera Plus to be very stable for me. Especially as of recent with the latest updates. I don’t have a crazy setup size and complexity wise about 4 locks, ~20 z-wave lights, and a few plugins for harmony and open sprinkler. I also don’t have many scenes probably about 10. If you don’t have much understanding of home automation to setup a system like homeseer (which looks and sounds better to me), vera is a good second option.