homeassistant

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Home Assistant is open source home automation that puts local control and privacy first. Powered by a worldwide community of tinkerers and DIY enthusiasts. Perfect to run on a Raspberry Pi or a local server. Available for free at home-assistant.io

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ZigBee and Zwave? (lemmy.world)

submitted 2 weeks ago by gedaliyah@lemmy.world to c/homeassistant@lemmy.world

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I see a lot of posts about people who like their Zigbee and Z-Wave products. As I'm setting up the hardware in my home, I'm using Wi-Fi products because I already have Wi-Fi. I don't see much difference in price. What is the actual benefit of setting up a separate network for home devices? Is there a reason that I should consider setting up one of these networks?

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[–] realitista@lemm.ee 7 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

I run Zwave and love it. Advantages:

better range and less interference in 900mhz band with meshing
better battery life. WiFi uses up to an order of magnitude more power. Battery in Zwave devices lasts for years, with new ones being even better in this regard
more secure as they cannot be hacked by hacking your internet or getting on your WiFi.
more feature rich. Zwave devices tend to be geared towards more pro use and tend to have just about every feature you can imagine
The Zwave standards body is quite strict in ensuring devices adhere to the standard so it's much harder to get "stinker" devices that don't. This is a bigger problem with zigbee for example.
fully local. You can be 100% sure they aren't sending your data off somewhere
Generally high quality. I've had quite good luck with pretty much all the Zwave devices I've bought. They last a long time and are reliable if your mesh is working properly (enough powered repeater nodes).