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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
I’ve got several switches in my new kitchen that I’m going to put in Inovelli (I already have a dozen red and blues around my house). I will have about 6 3-way switches and 6 single switches (but many grouped together, so like 2 single and 2 3-way in one 4-gang box).
Because the switches are going to be next to each other, and the LED colors on the Blue vs Red aren’t identical, I want to have all the same switches in the same box. Can I mix and match Blue and Red on a 3-way setup or am I better off going with one line? I think I prefer Z-Wave due to your reason about interference on Zigbee, but do they not work (well) on 3-way setups? Should I stick to all Zigbee so I can bind the two switches on the 3-way together, or is that not necessary to make a 3-way work properly?
I don’t believe that’s the case anymore. The first batch of Blue switches had different LEDs than the rest, but all of the subsequent switches (blue, red, white) should all be the same. I’ve got a lot of locations where I have a blue 2-1 sitting next to a red 2-1 and they are indistinguishable.
You can but there are a lot of caveats. Only one switch physically controls the load. The other switch would be providing scene controls to the hub which would then drive the first switch. There wouldn’t be smooth dimming control and depending on your hub’s automation speed, you may notice a delay in processing inputs. This also means if the hub is offline, the second switch won’t work at all.
I’ve found much smoother results with 3 ways using Blue switches since Zigbee binding behaves a lot better (in my opinion) than Z-Wave associations. If all of your setups are just with 2 switches, you’ll probably be fine with using Z-Wave, but most of my multi-ways are 4+ switches and I’ve never had good luck with those on Z-Wave.
