Best Series Red/Blue/White - New User for all things smart home

[ThereIsNoSky]

Hello,
I’m about to buy these switches for my entire (new) home. I can’t decide which line would be best.

I was leaning toward Z-Wave for the 900MHz range, but I’m not sure if that is the best option with the future “Matter” compatibility of the Blue series.

Which one was most recently released?
I would love some expert help from people who have messed with this stuff before.

2 points of note:

• I’m going to be placing my order for these switches in the next 6 hours or less
• I don’t have a “hub” picked out. I work in Industrial Automation, and I will most likely “roll my own” using Ignition by Inductive Automation. (So hub doesn’t really matter that much to me)

[rohan]

Red series is Z-Wave. Blue series is Zigbee (not upgradeable to Thread/Matter). Both of these have basically identical functionality and performance besides their radio (900mhz vs 2.4ghz).

The white series is thread / matter but has reduced functionality (due to limitations of the matter protocol currently) and is not yet available.

Personally, I recommend a mix of Z-Wave (anywhere there’s only a single switch and no smart bulbs), and Zigbee (multi switch binding or binding to smart bulbs) since Zigbee is more interference prone due to frequency.

I would recommend against making your own hub, especially with Inovelli products. Their switches have a very large amount of functionality and params and building that into a hub is not easy. If you want something that supports a lot of DIY functionality, Home Assistant with Z-Wave JS UI / Zigbee2mqtt will likely be a good path forward.

[ThereIsNoSky]

Watching this video from home assistant, it looks like Matter is the future.

The State Of Matter

I was wrong, I will be using Home Assistant, and then controlling it from my industrial automation program (Ignition)

In this article it says that the Blue Series is Up-gradable to Matter.

Red, White & Blue Series Differences

Hey all, With the announcement of the new Thread/Matter switch, I wanted to share a quick chart that will highlight the differences between the various switches. I’m going to use the 2-1 as a benchmark as this will be the first switch that will have all three protocols implemented. 6/27/24 - Edited to remove Blue switch upgrade to Matter capability. Description Red Series Blue Series White Series Protocol Z-Wave Zigbee Thread w/Matter Upgradeable to Matter No No N/A (included) Wor…

Do you know if that’s still the case? If so, I’m going with the Blue series.

Thanks!

[hydro311]

Early on, the initial hope for (ZigBee) Blues was that there would be a path to later update to Thread.

However, it’s since been confirmed that updating either the MG21 or MG24 chip from ZigBee to Thread is not feasible - although either chip can do either protocol, it has to be set up as one or the other and cannot be (easily, if at all) changed later on.

[ThereIsNoSky]

This is great info! Thank you so much!

I’ll go with the Blue, and then maybe work to get a zigbee to Thread hub-converter at some point in the future.

[rohan]

@ThereIsNoSky

Watching this video from home assistant, it looks like Matter is the future.

Honestly, I’ve been hearing that for 4 years and so far nothing I’ve tried has lived up to the hype. It might be the future, but it’s certainly not feature complete today and I personally am not willing to buy hardware on future software promises.

[ThereIsNoSky]

Agreed. I want something full featured today. If we can integrate with it in the future, that will be wonderful.

[stephen.brown2]

@ThereIsNoSky

then maybe work to get a zigbee to Thread hub-converter at some point in the future.

There’s no need for that if you’re going with Home Assistant that will talk Zigbee already. A converter would likely just muddy up the airwaves and make the possibility of interference even greater.