Z-wave plus at its core is fine, the protocol is pretty well designed for home automation, and at least the chips I've used have been fine. Sadly the ecosystem is a bit of a shitshow. Everything will work to some degree, but you'll probably end up spending an hour or two reverse engineering exactly how any given device communicates what its seeing, and what configuration is needed to avoid draining the batteries within a month or two.

I'm cautiously optimistic for Bluetooth Mesh giving z-wave a run for its money but its still very early days.

Z Wave+ addresses many of the security concerns of Z Wave (the licensing costs remain, obviously).

A lot of z-wave+ devices do not implement that security portion and it's a pain to set up on top of it.

Z-wave's biggest short coming in my opinion is how easy it is to overload the network. Turning off 40 lights at once has half of the operations drop off due to the network getting overloaded and just dropping commands. If you have a few devices reporting their power usage, the network becomes quickly overloaded and you get the same command dropping crap in even simple operations like 'turn on light 2 when light 1 turns on and vice versa'.

I have a condo with z-wave everything right now, but after seeing how much of a mess all IoT home automation crap is, I'm going to sit and wait until we have something that works properly that doesn't cost $60-$100 per light switch or require maintaining something complicated.

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IMO we should have a dual network solution. Something like wifi for plug in devices which also act as repeater networks for the battery powered BLE sensors and such.

I use Insteon. About 100 devices. Plugs, light switches, HVAC, leak sensors, motion sensors, cameras. Their support sucks when you have to deal with them and the programming of this then that is nowhere to be found. On the other hand I have had to deal with support twice and after pulling their heads from the ass they fixed the issues. Otherwise it pretty much just works and works as scale. These guys started with the X10 stuff in the 80s and are not going anywhere. So if you want something that will just work it is the best bet. They have a hub with HomeKit integration but I am not using it as they do not support some of the older door sensors with it yet.

Insteon sends packets concurrently via both radio and the power line. Devices also act as repeaters: there can be up to 4 hops to reach the destination. In theory this makes it one of the most reliable networking tech.

But it's dated (from the 1990s), there is zero encryption/authentication, and devices are kinda expensive.

It's not the lack of a dual link part, but the easy network bandwidth congestion part thats the problem with z-wave.

I used to use insteon in a small test build out, but got frustrated with their bad software support. You have to use a ~$300 hub with a $80 PLM modem before you can get something half decent. And Insteon devices having a reputation of breaking after a couple of years due to using cheap capacitors and such put me off from using it any further.

Absolutely agree. I have a z-wave alarm, and often times the automation rule will turn the alarm off, but will leave the strobe on. Sometimes lights will no turn on (or off). Sometimes some door sensors will report to be open when they are not.... it is a complete mess.