HA Best Options, new setup.

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tehsimz

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#2961007 29-Aug-2022 23:00

https://www.mjselectricalsupplies.com.au/legrand-arteor-smart-starter-kit

Has any one used any of these Le Grand? Looks like Zigbee? Might not catch house on fire?

Handle9

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#2961010 29-Aug-2022 23:36

johno1234:

What is the advantage of Zigbee over wifi?

Zigbee is a low power mesh network. If you have battery devices zigbee will work for several years, wifi will work for several hours.

Zigbee is great for simple, cheap devices that have low bandwidth. A light bulb or switch is on/off and may have some colour data associated with it. A combo room temp/rh sensor has 3 or 4 data points and generally it really doesn't matter if it takes a couple of minutes to refresh, especially if it's monitoring only.

If you have a good network of mains powered zigbee routers the network will perform pretty well. If you don't it likely won't.

Handle9

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#2961011 29-Aug-2022 23:39

I run HA, zigbee2mqtt, node red and a few other things on my Unraid server in docker. It works very well and means I don't have to run a separate hardware device. It performs much better in a reboot/reprogram situation than it did when I had everything running on a raspberry pi. I wouldn't go back without a very good reason.

Handle9

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#2961012 29-Aug-2022 23:42

Chippo:

I used to be heavily WiFi + Cloud - this was a mistake. Zigbee is significantly more reliable (And the vendors can't EOL a $500 product on a whim)

Agreed. Cloud solutions generally are painful in some way. It needs to be pretty cheap to be useful.

Things like Tuya/smart life can be fluffed around with to run locally though.

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