A Z-Wave Blog

I’ve been interested in Home Automation for several years, although that interest has never actually extended to doing anything until now.

ZigBee first sparked my interest.  The idea of having lots of devices spread about your house, each relaying information to each via radio other is very appealing.  I have a house built in 1969 by an architect that was seriously into concrete.  No easy way to run new wires throughout the house.

Having a mesh of devices means that each devices does not have to broadcast a strong radio signal, which in turn means that each device does not have strong power requirements.  Some devices could run for years off of a couple of batteries.

While ZigBee is interesting, I wasn’t able to find any consumer devices available for sale to me in Europe.  While doing my latest batch of ZigBee research I came across Z-Wave,  which is a similar technology, but is available for use in the real world.

I now have several Z-Wave devices installed and running in my home office:

A couple of Motion Sensors (ACT ZIR010 / ZIR000):  

A dimmer switch (ACT ZDW232 / ZDW120): 

A plugin-in switch (ACT ZDP200 / ZRP100):

… all purchased from HomeSeer. I’ve bought the European versions, since I live in Switzerland, however I’ve also shown the US versions (Z-Wave in Europe operates on a different radio frequency to the US).

I have ordered a bunch more devices to install throughout the house.

In this blog I intend to talk about how this goes, from the initial purchase experience, reviews of the devices themselves, how I installed them, and how I configured them.

Since I am also a developer I intend to control some of the devices from my home computer and I’ll explain how I went about this,