10 Reasons for ripping out a £6k lighting system #Zwave #WiFi #IoT #InternetOfThings

Rob Dobson, a career wireless person, chronicles automating a new home in 2012:

…my wife and I started a house renovation project in Edinburgh (Scotland) having moved to that great city the previous year. In our previous London abode we’d installed a wireless lighting system from a company called Rako and it worked well enough to convince us that wireless was the way to go. Now, having installed and maintained a system with over 150 wireless lighting control circuits over the past 7 years I’ve finally had to admit that my technology choice was wrong. The Z-Wave wireless lighting system I installed just doesn’t work for a home like mine. I have now ripped out almost all of the Z-Wave units I installed – which had cost me more than £6k to buy and install.

For the home configuration, Z-Wave was just unworkable. Why? 10 reasons:

  1. Z-Wave Pairing
  2. Z-Wave Healing After Adding a Module
  3. Scale
  4. Resilience and Backup
  5. Failure Concentration and Complexity
  6. Failure Rate
  7. Dead-Nodes
  8. Handling Power-Failures
  9. Poor Diagnostic Tools
  10. The Cost

The new lighting system is WiFi based and costs a fraction of the Z-Wave system.

See a detailed description in the post here.


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