frontpagebonkman posted Jul 01, 2025 01:10 AM
Item 1 of 3
Item 1 of 3
frontpagebonkman posted Jul 01, 2025 01:10 AM
The Smartest House Home Automation: Toggle Dimmer $22, Long Range Wall Remote
& More + Free S&H on $59+$19
$45
57% offThe Smartest House
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The "old timey senior fan club" remark is probably because z wave is a dying protocol. That said, my experience (having come to z wave from Wi-Fi), is that the devices (so far) are much more reliable than my Wi-Fi devices, and it's allowed me to ditch a lot of noisy Wi-Fi clients (which may have contributed to my reliability problem). All Zwave is local network only by design, no silly round trips through some remote server, no silly apps constantly shoving ads in your face.
I haven't used a ton of z wave brands but the zooz stuff has been great. My experience has been that it supports all the latest zwave stuff, supporting s2 security and smart start out of the box.
Smartest house seems to basically be the primary zooz vendor. I'm not a fan of the $100 free ship minimum, but these sale prices are decent for zwave stuff. I have been waiting for the zen37 to drop back down (I think historical low is somewhere around $17) to buy a handful to use as a dimmer remote.
That said, if you don't know what zwave stuff is already you probably don't want it.
I have a fair number of zooz devices. They're ok, they feel sort of cheap compared to innovelli, but they're also half the price. The remotes and scene controllers are fantastic though.
People have been saying z-wave is dying for a long long time. First zigbee was killing it, but then we realized that interoperability with zigbee sucked and that companies like Aqara were advertising zigbee, but intentionally making it incompatible. Then it was WiFi devices, clogging up routers and spying on you. Then they said Matter & Thread would kill z-wave, but the the roll out of those products has been some wear between slow and totally stalled.
So here we are. Home automation still sucks, and z-wave is still sorta the best of the worst.
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I recommend buying Third Reality Zigbee products on Amazon.
Though I do like that ThirdReality stuff I have doesn't use button cell batteries. d
I have a fair number of zooz devices. They're ok, they feel sort of cheap compared to innovelli, but they're also half the price. The remotes and scene controllers are fantastic though.
People have been saying z-wave is dying for a long long time. First zigbee was killing it, but then we realized that interoperability with zigbee sucked and that companies like Aqara were advertising zigbee, but intentionally making it incompatible. Then it was WiFi devices, clogging up routers and spying on you. Then they said Matter & Thread would kill z-wave, but the the roll out of those products has been some wear between slow and totally stalled.
So here we are. Home automation still sucks, and z-wave is still sorta the best of the worst.
So here we are. Home automation still sucks, and z-wave is still sorta the best of the worst.
though I've had no issues with my C7.
I missed last year's BF sale and was waiting for it to go back to $120-130 since then. Welp.
I don't really comment on it anywhere ever, because the Z-Wave ecosystem mostly just works, once properly set up, so there's very little I can share. Sadly, can't say it about most of Zigbee stuff I tried
There were some issues with my setup over these years, but most of them were either because of bad equipment choices on my end (i.e. running HA on RPi with a bad SD card, lesson learned) or because of some strange software glitches after HA breaking updates.
My only regret is that I was buying stuff gradually and missed some good prices on a few things (like Titan actuators) that I still miss.
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That being said unless the discount is at checkout. I'm not seeing how this is different from their normal pricing.
I have several Zooz switches and they have been *mostly great. Also the customer support is fantastic (supporting my own mistakes)
*I had some connectivity issues with 3 700 series switches while connected to a 500 series USB stick. The connectivity issues decreased when I upgraded to a 800 LR stick, but there are still occasional drops. I have no issues with my 500 and 800 series devices (including those from other vendors).
Also I thought I'd mention that the physical button feels much better on the zen77 800 series than on my older 500 series.
I recommend buying Third Reality Zigbee products on Amazon.
Indeed, the big distinction of Third Reality products is using AAAs instead of coin cells that also die quicker; I've been burned by other HA products that way.
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The "old timey senior fan club" remark is probably because z wave is a dying protocol. That said, my experience (having come to z wave from Wi-Fi), is that the devices (so far) are much more reliable than my Wi-Fi devices, and it's allowed me to ditch a lot of noisy Wi-Fi clients (which may have contributed to my reliability problem). All Zwave is local network only by design, no silly round trips through some remote server, no silly apps constantly shoving ads in your face.
I haven't used a ton of z wave brands but the zooz stuff has been great. My experience has been that it supports all the latest zwave stuff, supporting s2 security and smart start out of the box.
Smartest house seems to basically be the primary zooz vendor. I'm not a fan of the $100 free ship minimum, but these sale prices are decent for zwave stuff. I have been waiting for the zen37 to drop back down (I think historical low is somewhere around $17) to buy a handful to use as a dimmer remote.
That said, if you don't know what zwave stuff is already you probably don't want it.
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I recommend buying Third Reality Zigbee products on Amazon.
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