On a related to house topic – I purchased a few Homeseer Z-Wave light switches and installed them in my current house. I wanted to test out the install process, as well as see how well they integrate. I also purchased a Homeseer HS3 automation controller so they had something to connect to. If these work, I’ll get them for the new house. They are about $50 each, so I want to make sure they will work well.

I previously had HAI UPB Switches in this location, and you can see the HAI switch on the far left in the 4-gang, and the right in the 2-gang. The HAI switches have a single two color LED for status.

The new Z-Wave switches have 7 RGB LEDs that you can control over Z-Wave for any use. Right now they are just set to the light level, but in the new house I’ll do things like have the switches in our master be red if the doors are unlocked, so you will know when you go to bed to lock them (perhaps with a double click of the light switch).

One of the downsides of a software switch is how fast they turn on. These switches have a programmable ramp, and at the zero ramp they are pretty instant. Not perfect zero latency, but better than the UPB ones.

Connecting to the Homeseer app was trivial, and in just a few minutes I had a few scenes configured so that if you double tap any of the switches all of the lights in that room go on or off, and if you triple tap it goes to low light night mode.

It would be easy to make that functionality time dependent so at night a single click is always a slightly dimmed setting, etc. I also did a quick Alexa integration, and the switch names worked directly from Alexa.

The left switch in the 2-gang is a ‘companion’ z-wave switch designed to go where normal ‘traveller’ switches would go (in a 3-way or 4-way configuration). It does not control any actual load, but just uses a single traveler wire to communicate to the master switch. It does not have the status LEDs, so I’m not sure my OCD can handle that.