Polling to see how happy people are with their VeraPlus upgrade.
What model did you upgrade from and how do you rate the Plus?
Ideally the Plus and Wink and Iris and Smartthings and etc are the same +/- a radio or two. What separates them is support and community. Thank GOD Vera has a robust community, thank goodness… Its’ only saving grace, however, that is not enough. It just isn’t coming along fast enough, I ONLY upgraded from the Lite for the Zigbee radio, and guess how many of my 50-60 zigbee devices I currently have paired to my vera plus? … 0 what a shame…when my intention is to SOLELY use this box…what a shame. We’re coming up on a full year now and absolutely no zigbee,bluetooth or wifi enhancements. what someone said in the forums when it was first shipped rings true, ONLY added these penny radios to the box + some solder for marketing.
Let’s see them work, c’mon.
Have to agree with hax0rmort here - there seems to be zero vendor support for the Vera at this point. I spent the past five days trying to do a firmware upgrade, which resulted in a working unit going to a brick (following the manufacturer’s directions point by point) and an offer to do a reduced cost upgrade.
Not sure why anyone would go the Vera route at this point, as it seems to be abandonware. The community support is outstanding, and I’ll retain the one working unit I have, but I’m not sinking any more money into what is a lost cause. I’m not a fan of the cloud/server-based models that Wink and ST put forward, but at least money is being sunk into development of those platforms.
It’s a shame - they had an opportunity to grow and become a good acquisition target, instead they’re going to be a casualty of the larger HA war.
When I first bought my Vera Lite in 2012 it worked quite nicely. When I moved into a larger house in 2014 it continued to work pretty well overall. And then at some point it started to go south and have issues even though nothing that I could notice had changed. In particular there was one update done at ether the beginning of 2016 or late 2015 that really caused most of the problems. It may have been the one where they stopped doing vera routing and instead relied on the build-in z-wave one.
In march I switched to a VeraPlus and almost all my problems went away. Range was better. Speed was better. Loading things went quicker (but still not fast). Things thad hadn’t worked for years (the humidity values from my thermostats example) just started working. I would NOT go as far as to say that it’s been rock solid, rather more of a “works well most of the time” kind of thing.
I personally think that the VeraPlus was a great upgrade for me.
I had much the same experience with my UI5 Lite - it ran pretty well for the last 3-4 years but in recent times something happened which made the z-wave network a lot less reliable. I could have just rebuilt the network from scratch, but it seems like people are getting somewhat happier with UI7 these days so I got a Vera Plus last week. Obviously I don’t have much depth of experience with it so far, but it has been positive. I just gradually reset zwave devices (rather than detach them formally from the Lite) before re-associating them with the Plus. Despite my qualms about the lack of battery support, almost all devices associated without having to move anything. Mostly Leviton switches & controllers, some monoprice/schlage motion and door sensors. Haven’t yet decided whether to associate my handful of old intermatic switches with the Plus or swap them out for something more reliable.
I do actually think the UI7 user interface is a step forward from UI5 - faster, and although there’s quite a bit of whitespace it makes better use of the space than UI5. Still have some work to do rebuilding all the PLEG rules… maybe this weekend.
Hi All,
I had the Vera3 and it worked after I got all the bugs out, no dif than the Vera Plus at first I could have put it in the garbage. After month and months of use I like it, still some issues but works and I think it works well. Will it be compatible with everything NO, what is. The key is to support the people interested in developing the plugins, keep them happy and you will be to. I know this forum has lots of very bright people, hats off to them. Keep up the good work Vera and forum members support in any way you can it helps everyone in the end.
I rate it today as a VERY GOOD.
thanks for everything.