I was wrong to ignore Zigbee and Z-Wave. They're the best part of my smart home

Re:I was wrong to ignore Zigbee and Z-Wave. They're the best... by CharlesW on Monday February 12, 2024 @12:08PM (#39347382)

> I tried that and gave up. Get ready to spend a lot of moeny, sensors and devices are still very expensive compared to the ZB counterparts.

When you compare apples-to-apples, there's no price penalty — for example, a Leviton Decora smart dimmer is $56 for Zigbee or $50 for Matter. Kasa's Matter dimmer switch is $27, and I see $3 Matter devices on AliExpress. Matter and Thread don't currently match Zigbee in terms of device diversity, but that's just a matter of time.

> Most Matter devices go with Wifi rather than Thread which makes your wifi network implode if you plan on installing a large number of them.

Even hundreds of Matter devices using Wi-Fi would collectively use an insignificant portion of your Wi-Fi network's throughput.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:I was wrong to ignore Zigbee and Z-Wave. They're the best... by santialbo on Monday February 12, 2024 @12:45PM (#39347889)

Try having more that 40-50 devices connected to your home router and you will see devices disconnecting randomly because your router can't keep up with them.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:I was wrong to ignore Zigbee and Z-Wave. They're the best... by CharlesW on Monday February 12, 2024 @01:07PM (#39348172)

I have more than that on my ordinary consumer router and have never seen a problem. Worst case, it'd be straightforward to dedicate a Wi-Fi router to your smart devices in the same way that you have a hub (and possibly repeaters) for your Zigbee devices.

[ Parent | on HN ]