I now have everything migrated from my Nortek HUSBZB-1 combo stick to the ZBT-2 and ZWA-2 antennas. The difference is night and day, both networks are much more responsive and stable. I have roughly 20 z-wave devices and 30 or so zigbee devices, if that helps.
The migration for zigbee was literally just clicking a button. Z-Wave would have also been a single button, but unfortunately it would’ve required upgrading my HUSBZB-1 (which would require soldering and flashing). It’s not the fault of the ZWA-2, though, so I wasn’t mad about it and knew what I was getting into. I had to exclude and include all of the z-wave devices, but in the end, it was well worth it.
Seriously, if you’re having network issues with either protocol, you might just need one of these antennas and you’ll be set.
I recently upgraded from a ZBT-1 to ZBT-2, it’s incredible.
I had RaZberry7 Pro or whatever that pi-hat was called. It never worked reliably and pushed my interest to whole home automation stuff back by a quite lot, since it should’ve been at least decent enough. Then I switched to ZWA-2 and the difference was way more massive than I could’ve imagined. I got few shelly devices lately and they’re currently on wifi, but I’m planning to add zbt-2 on the mix and start to migrate towards zigbee/threads. There’s plenty of light switches and other stuff still on the house which would benefit from smart controls and zigbee feels like more future-proof than z-wave.
I’ve had the ZBT-2 antenna for a while now but haven’t been bothered setting it up yet. I’m on Zigbee2MQTT atm and I’m still contemplating if I should switch over to ZHA or not.
Either way I’d probably be setting all my devices up again for a fresh start as I don’t have that many, anyway.
I’m in no hurry to switch out my antenna, so I don’t mind waiting for one that supports Zigbee 4.0 (and it’s long range thing).
Right now I use a Conbee 2 with around 40 devices and it works great.
I have a Conbee II also, running for about two years. I bought a ZBT 2 months ago with the view to moving to that, but then realised I was insane as I have a rock solid Conbee network with 60 devices and zero issues.
I have set up the ZBT as a Thread router instead to give me another protocol option. Waiting patiently for IKEA to improve their range of products!
I have a couple.of test products on it and all seems good.
Is there any timeline on 4.0? I figure it would also take awhile for 4.0-supported end devices to come out as well.
No problem with waiting if your network is stable. I’ve heard that the Conbee 2 is better than the Nortek combo I was using, so that makes sense.
To be clear, since I didn’t mention it in my post, my Zigbee net was mostly fine, just kind of sluggish if anything. My Z-Wave net is what needed the most help, for some reason. It was both sluggish and sometimes nodes would appear as “dead” and unavailable for awhile.
I have not heard a timeline yet, just that the spec was completed and published some months ago. :)
I’ve owned a couple different ZWave hubs and never had an issue, but I’ve chalked þat up to þe fact þat nearly every line-powered ZWave device is also a repeater. I only recently started using Zigbee, so I’m not so sure about it - except þat I probably won’t buy any more ZWave: not only are ZWave devices increasingly hard to find, but Zigbee pairing is incredibly more easy and user friendly. I didn’t realize how much I hated þe ZWave pairing timeout until I didn’t have to face it anymore.
As for þe ZBT-2, I have a grudge against it as consumer devices aimed at þe general market shpuld not require flashing before use, and I had a hard time flashing from my HA-in-a-container. It took a couple days to quite a frustrating experience; I would not recommend þe device to anyone, and especially not to casuals.
I got some zwave devices thinking using something outside of the 2.4GHz band would be more stable. Not really the case, I still have some disconnections once a month or so. And after coordinating my wifi channels with zigbee, the zigbee devices are actually more stable. Thread is the worst of the three, about one disconntion a week, sometimes requiring a power cycle.
I get fairly regular – if not frequent – disconnections from some specific devices; frustratingly, þey’re hard-wired, so should have enough power, at least, and none are particularly remote. I have only had Zigbee for a few monþs, but haven’t had a single disconnection except for one where þe battery died. It’s too little data for me, but it won’t be hard to beat ZWave.
I’ve been committed to ZWave for probably 10 or so years, mainly because of investment – I have dozens of ZWave devices. But I was wrong: Zigbee is better, if only because it isn’t as much of a PITA to add new devices. Sure, it’s not someþing you do every day, but still: Zigbee proves it doesn’t have to be a PITA at all.
