I have my house done up with about 30 X-10 switches, and am looking at possible migration to Z-Wave.
I bought a few switches, the VeraLite, and set out to see how it compares. (No Insteon/X10 on the Vera – just three ZWave switches)
My biggest surprise has been speed, or the lack thereof. I was hoping to see something faster than my 1975-era X10 response time, but on the contrary – ZWave seems slower than X10.
I can turn on a light from Vera’s web interface, and it takes anywhere from a second to five seconds to actually get the room lit.
Is this normal?
I have a mix of GE dimmer modules and Sylvania (2004) receivers. Everything seems to be working correctly, just… slow.
I also have a GE remote controller, an Intermatic, and Sylvania. The handheld remotes are only slightly faster than Vera at getting the light on.
I can’t believe 900MHz is actually slower than PLC, so I have to assume I have a routing issue or some other network problem. Any guidance on how fast this should be?
No this isn’t normal as it should be near instant.
How big a place do you have and how far are the devices from Vera? Which Vera and version are you running?
Maybe you have interference from somewhere, or it sounds like the signals are being routed by a non optimal route. How and where did you include the devices? Depending on how you did this, you may have to optimize the network routes with a heal.
Zwave is a mesh network and there is a sweet spot in terms of amount of devices though.
Thanks strangely.
I suspect you’re right – I have the few devices I have spread out pretty far, and probably need to fill in more of the mesh. It doesn’t help that I’m moving stuff around.
I’m relieved to hear it’s supposed to be faster, as it’s just something to fix.
Does it bother Vera at all to have a second active Z-Wave network in the house (Nexia)?
[quote=“GroundLoop, post:3, topic:173369”]…
Does it bother Vera at all to have a second active Z-Wave network in the house (Nexia)?[/quote]
if the nexia network is making a mess of the zwave spectrum then yes. Kind of like if you had a nearby neighbor using the same wifi channel as you would degrade your performance.
I am under the impression that if things are set up right with zwave then no it shouldn’t make a noticable difference- but who knows what schlage/nexia is doing…
I just wanted to close this thread out, as my Z-Wave network is now right quick.
I believe the biggest factor was just ‘filling out’ the network with enough devices, now 25 or so.
I took the Nexia off-line, but that itself didn’t make much difference.
Having one or two ‘dead’ or unresponsive things seems to add a lot of delay, especially when they’re part of a scene or the network hasn’t healed around them.
All in all, Z-Wave is doing fine now. It’s very fast, and generally more reliable than X-10. When it does fail, it seems to fail ‘worse’, though. I’ll get it dialed in.
Summary: If your device response time is slow, then there’s probably something that needs fixing.