Among our many recent purchases for the house was light switches . I’ve been a fan of smart homes since before they really existed. As a kid I read an article in the September 1990 issue of Popular Science magazine about the “world’s smartest houses” and have been incorporating automation and remote control ever since, first with “Plug’n Power” controls from Radio Shack (a rebranded X10 implementation) and eventually Z-Wave switches, a SmartThings hub, and Google Home assistants.

We have lots of holes in the walls like this

Smart switches and controls have gotten a lot more common in the past decade, with their technology typically falling into one of several wireless categories: WiFi, Bluetooth, Z-Wave, and Zigbee. WiFi is fairly ubiquitous and you don’t need a hub, but the more devices you add to WiFi, the slower it gets. Bluetooth can create a proper mesh, but a lot of the implementations don’t and it has some range limits. Zigbee and Z-Wave are very similar protocols where they can create a mesh network from one device to another, but they both need a hub and aren’t inter-compatible. I have a SmartThings hub that can do both Z-Wave and Zigbee, but my existing switches and other devices are all Z-Wave.

After reading that Amazon was adding Zigbee hubs to new Alexa devices, I wondered if the writing was on the wall for Z-Wave and I should switch up. Ultimately I decided that I’d invested enough in Z-Wave already, and that having a mix would make a less reliable mesh. I also found that even if SmartThings goes away (a real risk, as a lot of companies stop supporting their devices after a while), there are open source solutions I can build that will work with my Z-Wave devices without needing a company behind it.

The obvious solution was to buy more of the HomeSeer light switches we have in the basement, except for a few things. First, they don’t dim as low as I’d like when they’re used with LED lights, which we have exclusively. Second, they don’t make them any more. They were replaced with a new version that probably solves the first problem, but they’re quite expensive and now have programmable RGB lights on the side, which seems like a feature I really don’t need for money I really don’t want to spend.

I expanded my search and found that there were several different companies selling switches, but it turns out most of them are the exact same Jasco switch just branded differently. The reviews on those had some notable shortcomings, but the only other actually different model I found on Amazon had other shortcomings. Buzzing sounds, reliability problems, slow response, any number of annoyances that I don’t want to deal with when I’m paying ten times the price of a normal light switch.

Lots of new switches

Then, finally I came across Zooz light switches. I actually have some other Zooz Z-Wave devices and I know that they have both good company support as well as custom handlers for SmartThings to enable all their features. Best of all they were reasonably priced, especially compared to the HomeSeer switches, and in the case of 3-way and 4-way, you can use a regular light switch at the other end, where most similar devices have special companion switches. I walked around and figured out where we want regular switches, where we want smart switches, smart dimmers, fan control, and I even picked up a scene controller so we can have a switch by the door that can control a bunch of different lights and scenes. The order arrived a few days later, but we’ll have to wait until the electrician comes back to get this all wired up since he hasn’t put the circuits into the panel yet and while I could do that myself, I’m already paying the electrician so he may as well finish the work.

I’ll report in once they’re install on how they’re working. Just the pairing process will take a while, and we’ll have to figure out which switch is which. Eventually I’ll get scenes built in SmartThings and integrate triggers from the security system as well.