ZWave supply updates

Hello,

It great to see zigbee on the way and getting out to market soon, however is there any update on the ZWave gear?

There is actually, great timing.

I wanted to save this announcement for later, but heck, I’ll share it now.

The struggle with our current Z-Wave manufacturer was that they produce products for much larger companies that basically eat up all the Z-Wave allocation and we’re left picking up the crumbs.

However, part of the advantage of this partnership I referenced in the company announcement was better negotiating and better manufacturer relations. Part of the deal included negotiating Z-Wave supply and we’ve managed to get some allocation of 800 Series chips (yes, you read that right :partying_face:).

We will be developing our 2-1 Switch for a B2B customer to be delivered in October/November this year in Z-Wave 800 Series. In addition, we will have a small supply ourselves that will be ready for the public at the same time.

Supply will be limited in Q4 (1-2k units), but will open up significantly in Q1 2023.

I’m actually really excited about this.

EDIT: Regarding existing SKU’s and Z-Wave, sorry, I should’ve been more clear – we will start with the roll-out of the 2-1 and then depending on the success, bring the other SKU’s in Q1/Q2.

6 Likes

Will there be pre-orders for this Z-wave 2-1? Would it be rated to work with a bathroom fan? I would really, really like to round out the rest of my house…I only have 2 more fan/light combos and a bathroom fan left to convert.

Possibly, I was trying to wait until after the Blue Series shipped to even announce this, but you guys get me so pumped I always spill the beans early!

Regarding rated for fans, no this will be a carbon copy of our Blue Series 2-1 which is not rated for fans officially.

The gameplan for exhaust fan ratings is to put out our dedicated fan switch (speed control) but to have a parameter on there that turns it into On/Off so it can be rated for fans.

Silly that we have to even go this route bc it’s doing the same thing as the 2-1, but UL makes the rules…

4 Likes

Just take money :sunglasses: can not wait for pre-orders!

2 Likes

Not sure I follow. In the future you’ll put out a new switch just for fans with an on/off parameter, but it will essentially be the same under the hood as the 2-1? Will the switch look different (more like the 5 button :thinking:)?

I know I’m asking questions I probably shouldn’t and you don’t have to answer, but if you don’t you’ll have to live with that urge f.o.r.e.v.e.r.

Lol it’s all good - it will be a Z-Wave equivalent of this switch we’re working on right now:

We originally thought our 2-1 switch would be able to be certified for inductive loads. In fact, we tested it on exhaust fans and it worked perfectly.

However, when we ran it through UL, they said, “no, if you are certifying it under 1472, you cannot say it works for fans bc 1472 is for lights only”. If we wanted to certify it for fans, we’d have to use 1917 (which is what we’re using for the Zephyr Fan switch in the link above).

So, Project Zephyr is a Zigbee fan version of our 2-1, which looks identical to it, except It’s certified for fans rather than lights. Again, really silly bc the 2-1 has on/off capabilities just like this fan switch will have, but we need the proper certification to legally say the switch is certified for fans.

We would take the tooling and functionality for that switch and convert it to Z-Wave.

Hope that makes sense?

Edit: To clarify, the functionality is similar to the 2-1 but not exactly the same as Zephyr has fan functionality whereas the 2-1 does not.

5 Likes

Ohh ok, so it’s all the same HW/FW/SW, but because you can’t run a single model through two different certifications you are calling it a fan-only switch and sending it through for 1917 cert as a unique model. And you’ll repeat the process for Z-wave. Have I got that right?

Exactly :blush:

Odd, the company I work for has products listed using more than one UL standard.

Thank you for sharing, added a lot to the conversation.

We just didn’t want to put the 2-1 through another UL certification and halt production any longer than it has been. And if we’re coming out with a fan switch, we didn’t see the point of adding another $20-30k to the existing product.

I read too quickly in his comment about running a single model through two different certs.