INTERACT FORUM
Devices => Engen -- Home Automation with Z-Wave => Topic started by: hoyt on January 04, 2019, 12:58:51 pm
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I've been a happy user of Engen for 6 months or so. It's rock solid, I don't even think about it, everything works. There are however things that I want it to do, that seem unlikely to be added at this point. For example:
- I have smoke detectors that are Z-Wave, but the only item reported in Engen is the battery %. I want to be able to see the smoke/ co2 alarm status, if something is triggered, send text messages if I'm not at home.
- I want to interface to more than Z-Wave. It seems every powerstrip I see on Amazon now is wifi, not Z-Wave. I like Z-Wave, but the powerstrip in particular seems hard to find, or far more expensive as Z-Wave.
- I want the scheduler to trigger on sunset, not time. IE - turn on porch light after the sunsets.
- I want a random holiday mode. At random times, turn on one of 5 lights. The scheduler is more rigid than this (I think at least).
- The Harmony remote that has light buttons, I want to turn on my lights. Harmony is mostly to blame for this, but other systems have ways around it, like building a fake device that Harmony thinks is a Roku.
- When my heater turns on, I want to turn on the ceiling fans.
Basically, I want more flexibility and this led me to finding Home Assistant. It's the epitome of flexibility, which is good and bad. The thing that I love about Engen is that I was able to put it into my house without confusion. You hit a light switch, the lights turn on - every.single.time. Right now I have Home Assistant setup around Engen (I added Engen's API as a service). This isn't great though because that Z-Wave status of devices is slow, HA seems to check every 30 seconds, so you hit a toggle in the HA page and the light turns on, but the status says off for 30 seconds. There's probably a way to add in Engen's listener, but I think that means quite a bit of Python code to build a custom plugin for Home Assistant.
Does anyone here use Home Assistant? Is it as reliable as Engen? One of my main fears is that it lacks the easy-user part and any integration into Panel would be lost. Thanks!
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The Zooz is the best outlet strip I've used:
https://yabb.jriver.com/interact/index.php/topic,110810.0.html
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The Zooz is the best outlet strip I've used:
https://yabb.jriver.com/interact/index.php/topic,110810.0.html
I got their ZEN15s for a few places and they seem really reliable. Way better than the aeon aeotec things I had before - those are terrible, I'd never recommend them. They constantly dropped from the network, I'd hit a button to turn them on and 5 seconds later they would respond. Sometimes they would never respond and I'd have to crawl on top of a bookshelf to turn off a light physically.
But that ZEN20 power strip is $85 on Amazon now, while other wifi ones are $25 on Amazon. I'd invest $85 in a power strip in the right place (where all 5 would be used and turned on/off independently), but I'd rather be able to pick up a $25 device to do the same thing.