HA Primer - Pos and cons of X-10, Z-wave, Insteon, UPB

The device was a plugin device. I have the homeseer z-troller so it doesn't act as a hand held remote. but, I loaded homeseer on my laptop, connected the z-troller up and walked around the house setting off events. Every device worked from every location. This took a bit of time to make sure that the all devices were working from each place I stopped. Now...all devices may be working because I have so many devices in the house now. But they do work. So I am not really on board with all the negative talk about Z-wave. It all has worked flawless for me from day one.

Reply to
mmikem32
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As I recall, you said your house was 2500 ft² on two levels not the 40,000 ft² on one level that Bass claims 4 hops will cover. Your test doesn't address the issue in any way since no one has said 4 hops is inadequate with the distances involved in your house.

Aside from mentioning the Lutron patent and the reference to the imaginary

40,000 ft² house which you quoted, the only statement I made about Z-Wave was, "Z-Wave requires a minimal density of modules to assure coverage. This plus their 4 hops max limits the physical size of a network although one supplier now offers a system with 7 hops max." I don't see where that is either negative or inaccurate unless you're claiming that your 16 device system will work equally well in the imaginary 40,000 ft² house.
Reply to
Dave Houston

BWahahahahahaha!!!!

LOL!!

Reply to
"Fat Tony" D'Amico

Good one..

Definitions of specious on the Web:

  • plausible but false; "a specious claim"; "spurious inferences" * gilded: based on pretense; deceptively pleasing; "the gilded and perfumed but inwardly rotten nobility"; "meretricious praise"; "a meretricious argument" wordnet.princeton.edu/perl/webwn
  • counterfeit, as in: Be careful, he is known for using specious arguments to back up his claims.
  • See a picture -
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Reply to
"Fat Tony" D'Amico

According to ABC News, "The average single family home was 2349 square feet in

2004"

That is roughly the theoretical limit with four hops and the controller located in the center. If the house were round, it would be more. Given four 30' hops we have a radius of 120'. You do the math.

Wrong. His home isn't a test of your ill-informed theory. It's a successful application of Z-Wave in a home that is slightly larger than average.

You've implied that it is grossly ineadequate for all but the smallest homes. You were wrong.

That is far from the *only* statement you've made. You have repeatedly claimed (without benefit of experience) that Z-Wave is inadequate to the task. The gentleman's application, along with numerous others, shows you were wrong on that count.

You've insisted that it would never take hold -- this despite the more than 100 companies backing it, including the likes of Intel.

All syetms have a limitation. Z-Wave is capable of automating much larger homes than you imagine.

Wrong again. It's 8. The supplier is InTouch

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Precisely.

Reply to
Robert L Bass

Almost all of the negative talk about Z-Wave has come from Houston. Everyone I've spoken to who has tried it says it works flawlessly.

When it first hit the streets, product options were limited. There were no

3-way switches or dimmers for example. This was an initial drawback but as you are aware 3-way switches are readily available.

Some folks didn't like the early release hand-held remotes. Some didn't like the cumbersome method used to remove a module from one's system. However, for most HA users it's not often necessary to remove a module.

Other than that the main detractor of Z-Wave is one fellow who has never seen a single Z-Wave module, much less tested one.

Glad your system is working well for you. I hope you'll share whatever troubles and successes you have as your HA project grows (they have a way of doing that) over time.

Reply to
Robert L Bass

Sounds like what one might try to cover the stench of a fish rotting from the head. ;)

Reply to
Dave Houston

A 40,000 ft=B2 house...Fine...Never claimed any about 16 devices working in that size. I was just asked about my setup and made the assertion that Z-Wave was better than X-10 IMHO. Thats it !

Reply to
mmikem32

Dave, Do you own any Z-Wave equipment? If so, are you having issues getting it to work? If not, are you using a technology that you are having problems with? I am just trying to understand your negative theorical specification speak against Z-Wave when most of the posters here think its a solid technology, and some posters, including myself, have a successful installation with no bandaids like line filters, etc.

Reply to
mmikem32

There are two reasons Houston dislikes Z-Wave. Neither of them has anything to do with Z-Wave itself. First, when it came out I spoke well of it. Houston has it in for me because I've disagreed with him on several occasions. That's why he often posts childish insults about fish and such. He erroneously believed that I was trying to sell Z-Wave. Second, Houston tries to market X10 compatible devices. As such he has a financial interest in steering people away from anything that isn't X10.

There's little hope that he'll change tack. A while back when he was having financial and health problems I offered to help him out, mistakenly believing I could bury the hatchet. He responded by posting a vicious, personal attack here. He claims he can tell what people are thinking and can detect evil intent even in friendly discussions.

I wouldn't bring any of this up except that Mr. Houston's negative comments about Z-Wave are misleading to the newsgroup. If taken at face value his posts could lead people into making wrong choices.

Reply to
Robert L Bass

To the best of my recollection you are the very first Z-Wave end-user (aside from dealers and installers) to post here in the 5 years or so that Z-Wave has been available. So "most of the posters here" have never indicated whether they think Z-Wave is "a solid technology". One rather knowledgeable person, the author of Charmed Quark, uses Z-Wave and has, by and large, agreed with most of the things I've had to say about it. Had you not just recently "fallen from the sky" into CHA, you would know that.

As to my "negative" views, I suggest you actually review my posts on the topic (my first post about Z-Wave was in June of 2002). You will find they are factual and backed by evidence. If you want to argue with me on technical issues I suggest you arm yourself with facts and supporting evidence rather than relying on the litany of lies and misrepresentations from Bass.

I live in a building that isn't very friendly to RF of this type. The walls are plaster with lots of wire lath and with metal junction boxes, metallic conduit, and hot water heat with large metal register enclosures in each room. I have no problem with either X10 or Insteon and my RF setup (of my own design) manages to handle RF quite well here.

While I have range tested some Z-Wave modules I do not use nor do I expect I ever will use Z-Wave. I try to test and evaluate each new HA technology (some manufacturers and dealers have loaned me hardware to make this possible) and report on it here for the benefit of others - especially those with disabilities for whom reliable HA technology is important.

Reply to
Dave Houston

There's a high irony content in that name when you consider that the most recent positive posts come from a person who indeed appears to have "fallen from the sky" into CHA. It could be genuine, but it always looks like someone's sock puppet when the first post they make here seems so serendipitous.

I've been looking for more info on why at least one manufacturer increased the number of maximum hops and unless something's wrong with Google, there just isn't much discussion about Z-wave out there on the net.

Results 1 - 10 of about 39 English pages for z-wave max hops. (0.21 seconds)

Most of the Google Groups searches lead to discussions by Dave, Dean Roddey and sometimes me. The lack of hits made me realize how many more X-10 units there are on the market (the site below says 5 million and still growing) than Z-Wave.

I still like what David Rye said on CocoonTech:

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(very bottom)

"These new technologies haven't yet been around long enough to even know what problems they have."

I find Zen-sys themselves a little shady when they say "unlimited signal range" although I am sure that the word "virtually" in this case is used to make the lie not quite so bald-faced.

"Z-Wave?s dynamic routing principle, integrated into the technology, secures a virtually unlimited signal range, as each of the Z-Wave devices repeats the signal from one device to the next. The same routing principle ensures the RF-signals are routed around radio dead spots and signal reflections thereby securing a highly robust transmission covering the entire home."

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If I understand the mesh network and max hops principles correctly, that paragraph is just total BS. The range is as far as max hops allows, and not a hop further. Maybe I'm wrong about that, but I seem to remember they limited the max hops in the first place primarily because network latency increases with each added hop.

-- Bobby G.

Reply to
Robert Green

Actually, you will find thatr Mr. Houston routinely posts apparently deliberate misleading "analysis" of data he finds online about Z-Wave. This is not the only subject for which he has been chastised for doing so.

I suggest the gentleman already has more experience with and knowledge of Z-Wave than Mr. Houston. For one thing, he actually uses it. Houston has never so much as laid eyes on a Z-Wave product. let alone tested any of it.

That is completely irrelevent to the discussion at hand. Were he to dwell in a metal box it would also be unfriendly to RF. That means nothing to the vast majority of users.

The setup of Houston's own design (or which he claims to have designed) is one of the real issues here. His design was and is a commercial failure. Z-Wave is not.

That is a fabrication. He has posted lots of erroneous supposition about Z-Wave but never tested any of it.

Name one manufacturer of Z-Wave hardware that has loaned you anything.

Reply to
Robert L Bass

Your understanding is correct. There's a neat little video on the Intermatic InTouch site that illustrates the difference between 4 hops and 8 hops. I've cited it before. Most two-way networks put some type of limit on the number of transmissions - Insteon has a max limit, TCP/IP has a "time to live" limit. Otherwise, in addition to increased latency, a signal that was neither ACKed nor NAKed would echo forever.

Reply to
Dave Houston

The range is roughly 30 per hop indoors. If the controller is located in the center of the house, a 4-hop signal can travel 120' in each direction. If this were a round house (not very common) the maximum area would be ~(3.14 x 120^^2) which is 45,216. Hence the theoretical limit of

40,000 sf. With an 8-hop system the limi quadruples to 180,000 sf. Again, this is for a round home.

A more typical though still very large rectangular home 200' in length and 80' deep would have a hypotenuse a tad over 215'. A centrally located controller could handle that theoretical 16,000sf home in 4 hops.

I submit that any system capable of handling a

16,000 sf home is more than adequate for most of the folks we meet here in CHA. I will post (with permission) to a new thread a few articles on Z-Wave which readers here may find of interest.
Reply to
Robert L Bass

Permission denied.

Reply to
"Fat Tony" D'Amico

Z-Wave products have only been commercially available for about three years.

Coincidentally, CQC (aka Charmed Quark) is being used to interface Z-Wave and an ELK-M1G controller on one of the better known Z-Wave installations, the winner of Z-Wave World's "Rock Star" award. I don't have the dimensions of the home but it's a nice example of what can be accomplished using Z-Wave, an ELK Products controller and CQC software.

Me, too. I asked Mark Walters of Zen-sys what was the largest successful installation of Z-Wave that he knew of. He said the largest job with which he was personally involved was a 7,800 sf home. That's twice the size of my little bungalow but my home presents a special challenge to any RF system. It's shaped like a "C" with a large, open space (Lanai) in the middle. RF transceivers in one wing will need to reach a controller in the other.

The most central utility space in the home is the laundry, but that's got some potential problems. There's a tall freezer and various appliances in there which may cause problems with blocked and reflected signals. I'm planning to try using that room first, just to see how well it works in a difficult location. If not, there's a decorative bridge between the "family" wing and the rest of the house where I could hide a transceiver.

I'm not yet up to climbing ladders and stuff but as soon as I get enough strength back I'll get started. I'll post my experiences here in case anyone's interested.

Reply to
Robert L Bass

With lots of links to your online store... On second thought... I'm not really interested in anything you have to say on the subject...

Reply to
Frank Olson

Quite believable since he attacked me as the original poster claiming I did not understand X-10 and would not be able to understand other technologies. It's uncomfortable when people get emotional, defensive and personal. Maybe I hit a nerve or maybe he is just ACTing. Funny he did didn't counter any of X-10s seven deadly sins I outlined in the opening post.

Reply to
echo

You're not alone. He's attacked me for having a name like a fish. :^)

FWIW, I don't mind that he has a financial interest in what he posts here. Since I sell home automation and security systems online I have much more to gain than Houston. The difference is when I post something positive about something I carry I include a statement to the effect that I may be biased since I sell the stuff.

Reply to
Robert L Bass

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