I want to dip my toes into the smart home world and decided that I want to use homeassistant and primarily use devices based on zigbee, as I do not want to overload my wifi with a bunch of devices.
Smart plugs seem to be most interesting to me as I would like to have accurate power measurements for my homelab and applicances. The keyword is accurate here. There seems to be some science showing that the accuracy of smart plugs can vary a lot. I have read that devices that are flashed with the tasmota firmware can actually be calibrated. Unfortunately this firmware is only available for wifi devices.
So my questions are:
- Are there zigbee smartplugs that are known to be very accurate or can be calibrated to be very accurated?
- Is preferring zigbee over wifi actually a good Idea? I mean both use 2.4 GHz, which is known to be crowded. When will wifi smart home devices become a problem?
- Is a calibrated tasmota smart plug more accurated than a typical zigbee plug?
- Is this inaccuracy reported in the paper even relevant for non-scientific use?
Personally I would avoid ZigBee and Z-Wave for devices that report a lot of data. They tend to crowd the network pretty fast.
Zwave uses a different spectrum than zigbee and wifi though, so as far as wireless communication, it’s probably the most reliable.
Wired is mostly impractical for outlets.
Doesn’t change that the bandwidth for Z-Wave is tiny, and it’s a mesh, both of which means it’s not well suited for large amounts of data, like high throughput sensors (of which power reporting is one example). I have four dozen wifi devices and really don’t have any issues, I think it mostly gets a bad rep from people who a) use 2.4Ghz for other devices (I put only IoT on 2.4, everything else is on 5Ghz) b) use shitty home gamer access points instead of something decent like Ubiquity/Microtome/TP-Link etc.
Z-wave LR isn’t a mesh, and I’d highly recommend it. I have some very chatty smart plugs (I use them to share load on a breaker, so I need power usage updates quickly or the breaker will pop) and they’ve done a great job on LR.
I avoid anything using WiFi unless it’s running open source software. I don’t want to manage an IOT VLAN, and there’s just no reason my sensors and plugs need to understand IPv4. I just want things to be reliable and self-contained.
Like, I am a very choosy and grumpy person and I get immediately annoyed if I have any sort of connectivity issues. I’ve been using two Ruckus R750 APs in my 2400ft² (220m²) house with properly set minimum RSSIs, xmit power, and channel usage. IOT stuff owns 2.4 on its own channel as you’ve said. It’s wonderfully reliable and fast! My BLE proxies have had 100% availability (outside of power outages, since only my central rack has battery backup). So is my single 800 series Z-wave LR radio that runs off of PoE and is wired in just like any other AP.
I absolutely ditched zigbee for anything other than sensors though. I just couldn’t count on it.