Heh, it's funny because I've only known the opposite, but I guess I haven't looked into your type of system before. Perhaps things are different in this country?


Yikes! Yeah, that's absolutely a "new construction-only" kind of system! It sounds like there's really no options at all for retrofitting, are there? At least not without significant cable pulling.


I completely agree with you. However, this is the primary reason I'm unsatisfied with the Vera controller. Before I had that, I only had light switches, lamp modules, and physical remotes for the system. This worked beautifully. All lights reacted instantaneously, and immediately illuminated to the preset levels for scenes. It was sort of magical, how well and how quickly they reacted. It was as if they were all wired directly instead of wireless. However, for some reason Vera does not communicate to the devices the way it's supposed to with Z-Wave, and errors get introduced. They aren't terrible, for the most part it's worth the tradeoff of having the extra functionality, and frankly it wouldn't be noticeable to anyone but folks like you and me.

Z-Wave is actually pretty reliable, inherently. It's a mesh system, so all the devices can speak to all the others, and all of them will check to make sure the other switches heard everything properly. For this reason, it doesn't especially matter if your home is large and there's a big distance between your controller and the farthest device. As long as there's another device in-between the two, you're set because it'll pass the signal along. In my home, there's never more than 10 feet between any of my devices, and most of the time it's more like an average of about 5.


Well, no, but that's because it's a platform for which manufacturers build their own devices. There's nothing about the Z-Wave specification to "have an app for." Now, this is most likely because the tech was designed right around the advent of smartphones, so who knows, they might have done it differently.


That depends on the controller you use. Vera users are doing A/V control, but I haven't started my research there yet. It appears there are methods of doing IR or RS232 control.


This is by far my number one complaint. It baffles me that there's no solutions for this with Z-Wave. My home isn't enormous, but for some reason when I'm in my basement office, the doorbell is completely inaudible to me. There are plenty of wireless doorbell systems, but I want something incorporated into my ZWave network. I want to have someone press the doorbell, and get a shot of them on a security camera on my phone. It's so odd that the doorbell is the weak link here!

Also, I'm not sure if you meant this by "front-door communication," but just in case I wanted to make sure it was known that there are a number of ZWave locks available.


Some of what you mentioned can't be done on ZWave. The ones you mentioned that it can do are: blind control, alarm system, and video surveillance (there's tons of cameras available). There's a couple you mentioned that I don't really understand: "everything off functionality" seems like an easy thing to create with a scene using ZWave. I just made one this morning, actually, that makes sure all the lights in my house turn off at around 3:30am. I'm also not sure what you mean by "Panic button."

Some things you didn't mention, but I thought I'd throw in: there are ZWave modules that measure your homes electrical usage, others that act as moisture alarms (useful around your washing machine, for example, to tell you if the hose broke so you can rush home ). There's also temperature/light/humidity/motion sensors - some with all of those in one. I'm pretty sure I'm forgetting some others, but you see what I mean. There's more than just lighting and climate.

[quote[You mention that you haven't found a controller yet that you love, but in my opinion, the days of proprietary controllers are over.[/quote]
But that's the thing, the controllers themselves are proprietary, but because ZWave is a standard (if not an open one), there are a number of controllers available. You have to have something to turn your system into one that can be used via your mobile devices. Your Loxone has that Miniserver product, and I don't really see the difference. I am also able to control my system via web browser from anywhere in my home or outside it, since that's a functionality provided by Vera, which happens to be using ZWave. I could get this functionality from other ZWave controllers.


Don't get me wrong, what I like about your system is that it's rock solid. Ever since I moved to a more complex system, I've not had that rock solid performance, and have instead been getting by on 99%. Frankly that's good enough, but I know this technology can do better because I've seen it. I just need the company who makes the controller to do a little better


I have one final question for you: how do you control lamps in your Loxone system?

No idea. What might be true though, is that over here, more completely new houses get built, so it's easier to implement the ideal wiring for it. Maybe where you live, people renovate existing houses? In that case, I can see why a system like Z-Wave is popular where you live, and hardly known over here.



This is very true. You need to take this into account the moment you're building the house. Doing it afterwards is next to impossible.


Haha! Lol! That's just SO true!


Yes, I've read that! Smart! The same way Sonos does it really, and also the reason why their wireless works so good.


Yes, that was exactly what I meant. It indeed sure is an achilles heel. Maybe there isn't bandwidth enough to be able to send continuous audio over it, let alone video. These systems normally only send a few bytes per command ("light on/light off", dim to X %) - sending video is a whole different beast. I'm guessing the reason has to be sought in that area somewhere, otherwise I see no reason why they wouldn't have implemented this years ago.


Yes, that was what I meant. It's not terribly hard to do, but very handy to have to make sure no lights are on when you leave the house eg. (especially with little kids in the house). Another thing I didn't mention up to now: not to use buttons all that much anymore, but make more use of motion detectors. This is also a way of making sure the light will go off when nobody is in the room.
With Panic button, I meant a button, usually placed somewhere near the bed, and when you press it, all the lights go on, inside and outside the house. That's usually enough to scare off burglars.


Exactly!!! That's very nice to have, and not at all difficult to install with house automation. If you take it to the next level, you can all put it onto a web site, like this guy did. That's really over the top, I know, but it's cool to see it's possible nonetheless.


I'm sure they are constantly trying to make the wireless signal more reliable and less lag-free, because frankly, that's the hit or miss of their product. If that isn't any good, the product fails entirely. I wouldn't at all be surprised if they updated this technology every now and then. I just hope they do it in a way that's compatible with the former technology...



Very easy. There are two basic ways and one special way.
1) Either I connect the lamps, halogen spotlights, TL lights or LED lights (doesn't matter) to one of the relays of the miniserver or Extension, and then I'm able to turn that light on or off with the use of a button, a motion sensor, a timer, and event happening, a logical function, using a portable device,... you name it. I can light them up one by one, in groups, or all at once... anything I desire really. I'm only limited by the fact that it's only on or off, no dimming.
2) I connect the lamp, LED's etc... to a dimmer module, and then I can basically do the same AND have dimming functions. That's mostly where scenes come in as well, and then I can program "a tv viewing scene", "reading scene", etc...
3) One special function: controlling LED's via DMX. Using DMX, I can control LED strips in thousands of colours, which is extremely cool and enormously handy when it comes to setting up light scenes.

Here is a Youtube clip which shows you how lights get programmed into the software. You can see how easy it is.
Also, this is an online seminar on how to do lighting control with the software. VERY informative! (and about 40 minutes long )
This is a page with a lot of info on how all the modules work and should be programmed. The first section is on wiring, so that might interest you as well.

I got one of these for use in my Android remote project and it will do exactly what you want...and for only $20.

I got mine from the same ebay seller as in the link above.
I took the battery out of mine since it will never need to be powered by battery and you might do the same for this application.

Z-Wave Alliance Announces New Security Requirements for All Z-Wave Certified IoT Devices

"... implementation of the new Security 2 (S2) framework mandatory for all products that are Z-Wave certified after April 2nd, 2017. The security measures in S2 provide the most advanced security for smart home devices and controllers, gateways and hubs in the market today."

No idea how this compares with the Apple Homekit security approach.

Since this thread popped up again, I'd like to update how I got along with that Netgear WNCE2001 adapter after a few years.

It worked fine for the most part, but it had a few problems:

- The one Mac user in our household could only on rare occasions successfully wirelessly print to the printer that was connected through the WNCE2001. And on the rare occasions that it worked, it required a full reboot of the printer and the WNCE2001 before it did work. Most other times, even the reboot didn't work and she had to grab a USB cable. Everyone else on the network (Win/Linux) was fine and never had any issues.

- We have had long-term problems with our Chromecast devices on the network being flaky.

I recently replaced the printer with a newer HP printer with built-in Wifi, disconnecting the WNCE2001 entirely, and now both problems are now solved. Somehow the WNCE2001 was messing up the traffic routing on our local LAN and screwing up the chromecasts.

I've had so many problems with wireless bridges and repeaters over the years. At this point, if something only has wired ethernet, I set them up with powerline ([url=http://amzn.to/2jrjHl8]$37[/url) or moca. Ok, pretty much just powerline, since you can't do moca for under $100 unless they already have a router that supports it, and that's pretty much just Fios routers.

If your powerline signal is strong enough, it's plenty for a printer, and I love how dumb-simple they are.