The Z-Wave Alliance Takes A Look At Smart Home Technology Trends
January 16, 2022
If you’ve been following my posts about smart home networking I’m sure you’ve realized I am leaning heavily into Zigbee and/or Z-Wave as my standard. As I’ve explained, my goal is to eliminate the dependence on the internet and cloud management of my devices as local compute is more reliable and has less latency. For more detail, see my post “Wifi, ZigBee and Z-Wave: Which Is Best for your Smart Home?” for more details.
When building your smart home, you need to ask yourself how dependent you want to be on the cloud. All Wifi smart home devices depend on the cloud to work. You also need dedicated apps and the closest you can get to a centralized experience is syncing your devices with Alexa or Google. This doesn’t make the Wifi option bad but if your ISP isn’t dependable then you could be in trouble.
With hubs like Hubitat, Homeseer, or OpenHab, you can create a smart home that doesn’t rely on the cloud. This means that even when the internet is down, you can still control your smart home. And when you control your smart home locally, it also works faster. You’ll notice a dramatic difference between the time you send a command and it happens, like turning on the lights.
Z-Wave devices in the US are also less prone to interference issues than either Wifi or ZigBee. The reason is that Z-Wave runs on a different radio frequency (908.42 MHz) than both ZigBee and Wifi smart home devices (2.4 GHz). 2.4 GHz spectrum tends to get very crowded with everything from your smart TV to your smart wearables. Z-Wave avoids this problem entirely as it only has to contend with itself, even if you add a multitude of Z-wave devices.
Even when you use a cloud-dependent hub, like Wink or SmartThings, Z-Wave and ZigBee products benefit from company clouds involved in the process. Your hub does all the work locally, so if the company that manufactures your Z-Wave lightbulbs or ZigBee smart locks quits, your devices will keep working. As I’ve been a big SmartThings fan for some time this has been good for our smart home.
The Z-Wave Alliance, the standards development organization dedicated to advancing the smart home and Z-Wave technology, has released its third-annual Z-Wave State of the Ecosystem Report. The newly available report leverages a mix of syndicated data to provide a baseline of the overall smart home market landscape as well as data collected from a custom quantitative survey of 1,500 US-based smart home device owners.
The report uses this data to examine current and future smart home technology trends, and new opportunities with an emphasis on the role Z-Wave plays in market. The report indicates that there is a healthy market eager to add to their personal smart home ecosystems. This desire was especially strong among respondents who already own a Z-Wave device.
The report also found that smart security and home control systems owners exhibit a strong appetite to add more devices. Specifically, 97% of control system owners and 90% of smart security system owners have added devices. Additionally, those who already have a security system or control system exhibit identical purchase intentions when it comes to the devices that they are interested in adding. Top-rated devices included Wifi networked cameras, smart door locks and smart video doorbells.
The survey found, as well that self-installation has emerged as the dominant means of installation for a wide range of products, often purchased at retail or direct from the manufacturer. Devices more likely to be professionally installed are those attached to control systems or requiring more involved installation. On the pro-install side of the market, two thirds of those with installed smart security and smart home control systems have had their installer add more devices.
In addition to the deep data analysis provided by the report, there are studies of how Z-Wave has improved the management and efficiency of hotels, apartment complexes and even a full-scale smart community.
For more than two decades, Z-Wave has been a leading wireless protocol with security standards that are among the most rigorous in the industry. This is particularly attractive as hackers are looking for devices to exploit worldwide. And the Alliance is made up of a diverse group of manufacturers, silicon suppliers, developers, professional integrators, and more, all driving growth in the residential smart home category, as well as other market verticals, around the globe.
Poll response: Attitudes on Z-Wave home control
Don’t worry if this all seems very complicated. It really isn’t. There are just a lot of options. So take your time, do your homework and find out what’s best for you and your smart home. And ask a lot of questions. I’ve found the smart home community online to be very knowledgeable and helpful in making recommendations and answering questions. And I’d love to hear your thoughts on network preference. There are pros and cons to all of them.
As always, keep your comments, DMs and emails coming as Debbie and I really enjoy hearing about your smart home successes and answering your questions. Until next week …
In full disclosure, I’m not an affiliate marketer with links to any online retailer on my website. When people read what I’ve written about a particular product and then click on those links and buy something from the retailer, I earn nothing from the retailer. The links are strictly a convenience for my readers.
