First time poster here, coming at this from a slightly unique angle.
I have no Inovelli switches myself, as I have a smart bulb setup, not a smart switch setup. (Likely going to slowly start buying them for smart bulb mode, but not a cheap purchase so haven’t gotten around to it yet).
However, I have heard great things about them, and my dad has decided he wants to set up a smart home in his new house he just bought. He wants smart switches. I am happy to be admin for him for setup and occasional tweaks, but I don’t want to be on call 24/7 asking why the switch suddenly stopped working. So, my question is really, once it’s setup, how reliable are these smart switches?
Looking specifically at zigbee smart dimmers (and the one with the mmwave sensor for select spaces).
100% reliable, at least in my 20-switch install. Haven’t had to do a thing since I put them in the walls and got them configured the way I like them. They’re not independent, though… whatever coordinator you choose can be a weak link. I’m using a TubesZB POE coordinator with Zigbee2MQTT (no Home Assistant), Mosquitto, and Node-Red for automations (all apps run on an rpi). Yes, I have a system backup in case the pi goes belly up. I’d need to source a new one (costs have gone up, so I’d be sad), but the setup can be recovered.
Nothing but problems with my zigbee switches so far. 69 of them. Any paired switches (meaning 3 way with no aux so that all switches have light bars) have issues either when paired as group or as individual bindings. The issues are different both ways.
Right now I have them done with all “group” bindings, which I’ve been told is the correct way even though the documentation suggests otherwise. I’ve asked for some clarity repeatedly on why that should be how they are set up, and have not gotten any. The paired switches for 3 way circuits do not communicate reliably. If I dim a light from one end of the 3 way, the light bars get out of sync because only some of the commands make it through the zigbee network. even just toggling the light on and off, the switches get out of sync and one light bar is on and one is off.
Not much in the way of help on the forums either. Last instruction was “use a zigbee sniffer”, but I’ve asked 4 times what I should be testing and haven’t really had any response. I’ve also provided a bunch of new information and nobody even cares enough to say “just do the zigbee sniffer with your network how it is, capture 10 seconds of issues while trying to toggle switches, and then send that to us”
When binding the switches as “individual” bindings, I have to manually toggle every switch half a dozen time in the event of a power outage. otherwise they don’t talk to each other.
The only solution I can think of which will probably not solve every issue is for me to put aux switches on every multi way circuit, but then I lose the light bar. But that’s 30% of the reason that I put these in is so that I could see the status of a light from every switch in the circuit. For example, I have sconces and flood lights on the outside of the house that I cannot see from the switches. But because I have the light bars, I know they are on. You don’t get to pick where the aux switch goes if you do an aux switch setup, so the light bar will be on a random switch based on how the house was wired. I still suspect that this will end up with issues when running scenes or toggling/dimming multiple lights at once. Home assistant and the switch will disagree on what the state is.
It’s like the zigbee network that the switches create (which I have no control over or ability to define/fix) all run through one switch, and it gets bogged down by anything more than 1 command per second.
I will be running Home Assistant ZHA + ZBT-2 for them I imagine. They want a smart home but they aren’t super techy. Home Assistant is probably on the advanced side of what they can handle, but frankly the other options I think are worse. But I don’t think Z2M is worth it for them, so will just do ZHA.
I do love me my Inovelli stuff, but for true “set and forget” smart lighting, nothing beats Lutron Caseta (or their higher lines).
Caseta doesn’t have a lot of the bells-&-whistles Inovelli offers (and that can indeed be a showstopper, depending on wants/needs), but - hand to god - I have not needed to do a single thing in terms of care-&-feeding for any of my Caseta stuff since I installed it 5+ years ago, and it has been flawless performance-wise.
Lutron is a heavy consideration for me - partly because the new house they just bought already has like 7 switches throughout the house (but NO bridge I can find).
My one and only hesitance with Lutron (and reason Inovelli is being highly considered) is they want motion sensors and door sensors and some other stuff - all of which we would go zigbee for, and Lutron does not contribute to the zigbee mesh where Inovelli would. (That and having the mmwave switches for living rooms and bathrooms and such might be nice)
Not sure if you are replying to me, but the issue I have can be summed up by saying these light switches are bad at being light switches. The things that don’t work don’t have anything to do with home assistant or Z2M vs ZHA. The thing that fails the most is walking up to a switch on the wall, interacting with it, and having the switch(es) bound to it match the state correctly.
If I walk up to the slave and hit it, and the command doesn’t reach the master, the light doesn’t turn on. If I walk up to the master and hit it, and the command doesn’t reach the slave, the slave light bar doesn’t indicate the light is on. Dimming almost never results in master and slave light bars that match each other
Once set up with reliable downlights, my Inovelli Zigbee and Z-Wave switches have been 100% reliable (set it and forget it). Meaning they work in the background with or without my Home Assistant Server running.
I have three different use cases/setups I run. All running on Home Assistant with Z2MQTT or Z-Wave JS:
Sconces in a bathroom above the mirror. LED Bulbs (Load) wired to one switch. The other switch is “dumb” and just wired to power (hot + neutral). Picture Sconces with switches at both ends of the bathroom. The two blue switches bound to each other in Z2MQTT and have been rock solid for ~2 years and never a glitch.
Zigbee downlights in a room with one or more blue zigbee switches. All Zigbee smart downlights. Load only connected to one Inovelli switch with the switch set in smart bulb mode. Any/all other switches just receiving 110V with a hot and neutral, but not connected to any load. All downlights, the original switch with the load passing through it and extra switches are configured as part of a Zigbee Group in Z2MQTT (and bound with EndPoint 2 Level and On/Off to the group). -Rock Solid for 1.5 years after initially having issues with Juno Zigbee Downlights
Stand-alone Z-Wave switched directly connected to a load -single bulb fixtures here and there. Rock solid. Zero issues, but not pushing anything fancy like associations, etc.
I have a similar arrangement with my parents, where we installed about 20 2-in-1 blue switches and 10 blue fan switches in their house, including several 3-way setups (group binding, no aux/dumb switch) and managing them through Hubitat bridged into HomeKit. They are thankfully savvy enough that I can point them to the Apple Home app and they can figure out the UI from there for day-to-day use after I install, add it to the network, and configure it in the Hubitat.
I have never had to visit for issues with the switches themselves in the last 3+ years, only either because the Hubitat’s HomeKit integration stopped working or because the Hubitat itself decided to go on the fritz. I just told them to unplug and replug the Hubitat if things aren’t working, and that’s covered things.
I use ~40 red switches in my own home (mix of dimmer + on-off), and I have found those to similarly be 100% reliable over the past 5+ years. Issues again all reside with the Hubitat itself needing to be rebooted every couple of months.
TL;DR: Your setup time may vary depending upon how you choose to manage the switches, but 60+ switches have remained rock-solid for me once I’ve got them integrated the way that I want.
That’s awesome it’s all working well for them, but just be aware that doing an unplug/re-plug (without first a doing & confirming shutdown via the hub UI) is a fast-lane to database corruption. Maybe that never happens, or it take a while to tip those scales, but that power yanks like that are a very common (if not most common) reason for database corruption with Hubitat.