Thought I’d share my evolution to the HomeSeer Zee S2 – I’m sure many have shared similar experiences. I started to dabble in home automation in 1998 with the X10 platform. I liked the ActiveHome/Pro interface – intuitive and easy to set up recurring events, etc., but the system was a bit clunky, phasing of electric circuits meant not all rooms worked without some tricks, and every so often the system would just stop working.
Two years ago I liked the sound of SmartThings and switched. That meant shelving the X10 switches I’d collected. I started with 2 z-wave switches and recently added a couple of zigbee bulbs. First, the interface was more challenging than ActiveHome. Scheduling a switch to turn on and off required multiple events and forget adding it by days of the week. On top of that, about 25% of the time scripts would not run. They weren’t even in the log as having been triggered. We have our cats fed by an automatic feeder at 5am. When that doesn’t trigger, we know it and life is miserable. I needed something I could count on. I also wanted a system where the events were stored locally and not dependent on the cloud.
I started researching equipment again this fall. Having both z-wave and zigbee, I considered SmartThings v2, VeraPlus (due out end of year), the D-Link Staples Connect and then found HomeSeer. I’ve also been curious to see what Apple will do with HomeKit, but that remains largely absent with lots of promise and no real product line or flexibility at this point. So I made the jump to the Zee S2.
After getting the Zee S2, I had the z-wave switches programmed in minutes. Intuitive. Simple to set up events. I like the wifi option as that frees up where I place the Zee S2. With option to run X10, I pulled out my old switches and the CMA15 (I also have a CM11, but figured the 15 is newer so go with that). It took a bit of trial and error to get the CMA15 set up, especially to get the tab to appear when adding new devices. Fortunately the message board held tips that eventually got me going (order of installing software, CMA15 and devices matters). Now I can use my older switches for a while before dropping a large sum to expand my z-wave network (which I will over time).
Then there were the 2 zigbee bulbs. I was initially resigned to having to use the SmartThings app for those and HomeSeer for the rest of the system. Then I found a reference to using IFTTT. So I set up virtual devices in HomeSeer, events for those devices, subscribed to the HomeSeer and SmartThings IFTTT channels, created a couple of simple IFTTT scripts to turn on the bulbs based on the HomeSeer triggers, and I now can control the zigbee bulbs from HomeSeer.
So far all of my events have gone as planned, meaning the cats get fed and we get to sleep. I’ve still got lots to learn but it looks to be a good adventure.