Go with MCV. I returned the iris because it really does almost nothing unless you pay their ransom. I think the GE switches will work, because they claim to be z-wave - I’m going to try this today. The other parts are made by alertme.com, and are zigbee HA, so they don’t work with MCV. I’m trying to figure out how to bridge them into Vera. Anyone know of a root exploit for their hub?
The GE/Jasco switches all work. I’m using some in my house.
I recently purchased a Veralite to replace my Lowes Iris device. All of my units except for the power monitors linked to the Vera. The programming wasn’t very intuitive, but doable with some initial effort. I liked the flexibility of the system and how open it was for me to do what I wanted. I noticed I occasionally had trouble getting the unit to connect in the mornings, I usually had to reset it. Today I got the error that the LUUP engine was taking long to load and couldn’t connect to the unit. I googled it and found dozens of postings discussing this issue. I tried for many hours to recover the unit and never was able to get it working again. I called the help line and got no response. I returned it out of frustration and find myself wondering if it was bad luck or generally a buggy device needing endless hours of tinkering. I’m not sure if I should wait for another replacement device or just pay the $10 per month for less effort
You might want to wait until November and look at the new Staples system. It doesn’t have any monthly charges according to the article I read. It supports not only Z-Wave but the Lutron system as well, and since the hardware is being made by Linksys it’s likely to be much more reliable than Vera (ol’ unreliable herself :(). The software looks pretty nice too, although so far all you can see are sample screens. Even MCV’s screens look good on paper. It’s only when you start using them and see how unreliable it is that reality hits you.
Personally after 3 years of dealing with Vera’s problems I intend to jump on the Staples system the day it’s released.
I gave Veralite a second chance. Turns out the first unit I purchased was defective (Amazon warehouse deal). Now I’m loving it, I disconnected the Iris and plan on selling it on Ebay
I have something of a love-hate relationship with Vera… or more accurately, with this whole Z-wave deal. If I think about the kind of problems I have had, they break down like this (from most important or annoying to least important):
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Issues with the quality of Z-wave devices in general. Flaky firmware (having to power-cycle devices to keep them working or keep them reporting status changes to Vera) and no way to update that firmware, poor build quality, poor design (cheapy plastic), missing features that one would expect, DOAs, poor battery life. Thankfully this is being addressed, especially by companies like Fibaro. Regarding Vera, I found that for my somewhat larger Z-wave network Vera 2 was underpowered and unreliable, whereas Vera 3 does keep pace nicely, and has been very reliable up to now except for routing issues.
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Issues with some Z-wave design concepts and its exposed complexity. A normal person thinks “I push a button, stuff happens”, and doesn’t want to know about “Scene capable devices” or “Instant state updates”. From a normal person’s perspective these concepts make no sense at all. My central controller should know instantly about any button on any device I push in the network, period.
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Device support. Having to code for new devices on the market is kind of inherent in the way Z-wave works and cannot be avoided. However it’s not like we’re seeing dozens of new devices every week, and you’d think that MCV could be a bit quicker about supporting them. With that said, from what I hear Vera actually compares rather favourably against competing systems on that score.
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Inflexibility or complexity in achieving certain goals. This is where Vera needs improvement: a better UI with easy prgrammable logic, and a UI that is actually useful on mobile devices (UI4 performed well on my iPad1, UI5 is sluggish on the iPad 3, what gives?). Vera scores well on flexibility, with a useful HTTP interface and extension modules that are easy to build once you get over the initial learning curve (lack of documentation).
From what I’ve seen of competing systems, they will have many of the same issues that plague setups using Vera, support fewer Z-wave devices, and will be less flexible in supporting non Z-wave devices like WiFi thermostats. A pretty UI and easier scene programming do not stack up against those downsides.
Could not agree more intveltr. I have a Vera lite and quite a few devices, and a couple of large PLEGs and the system is close to its limit. So for me the only question is do i upgrade to Vera 3 or do i wait for the new ones ? And that is hard to answer as we have not got any arrival date for the new ones yet, nor do we know if we can port all of our beloved plugins, especially PLEG to the new system.
But for me there is no question, i’ll stick with Vera. But that is mainly down to the community, as without it Vera would not survive in my opinion
[quote=“mikee123, post:27, topic:172840”]Could not agree more intveltr. I have a Vera lite and quite a few devices, and a couple of large PLEGs and the system is close to its limit. So for me the only question is do i upgrade to Vera 3 or do i wait for the new ones ? And that is hard to answer as we have not got any arrival date for the new ones yet, nor do we know if we can port all of our beloved plugins, especially PLEG to the new system.
But for me there is no question, i’ll stick with Vera. But that is mainly down to the community, as without it Vera would not survive in my opinion[/quote]
Hi mikee123
I’m not sure what “quite a few devices” equates to.
I have 27 switches (of various types), 1 door lock, 7 plug-ins and 7 cameras (and a lot of custom Lua code) that runs fine on a Vera2. How do you determine the system is close to its limit?
Don
I had what looked like system reboots every 15 minutes, and i heard that could be down to the system being close to its limits. I have since found the cause for that, which had nothing to do with being close to its limits i must admit. I have since installed system monitor and just posted the results on another thread to find out how far of the limit i am. So my post might have been wrong in being close to the limit, i will know when someone had a look at my details. But i have had no problems since, so i am probably further away from the limit than i thought. Which is good, as the new Veras wont be out before next year.