Quick question, sparked by reading another thread here, and mostly for my own education…
I’m in the US. Is it possible to purchase and use a Fibaro HC3 here? From what I can tell, there isn’t a US-frequency version available, and I can’t find one for sale in the US. The only HC3s I’ve found are European models that sellers are willing to ship here, but obviously those are the wrong Z-Wave frequency.
On the flip side, can you use a Z-Box outside North America? Is the Z-Box Hub available in any frequency other than the US/CA/MX 908.42 MHz version?
Which leads to my bigger curiosity: How directly comparable are the Z-Box and HC3?
The HC3 seems to be a somewhat different product, with Zigbee, KNX integration, etc., and it’s also more than twice the price of a Z-Box. Obviously there appears to be some shared heritage/code base between the platforms, particularly in the UI and core functionality, but are they really intended to be equivalent products for different markets? Or is it more accurate to think of them as related platforms aimed at different markets, price points and use cases?
Not trying to fan any flames on the other thread - just trying to understand the market and the players. Thanks.
PS: or am I completely confused and looking at the wrong Fibaro product?
From what I know, the HC3 has more processing power (CPU, maybe also memory, IIRC) than HC3L/Yubi Home/Z-Box products. But Z-Box has ZWLR, which either isn’t fully implemented or (probably) not tested for the EU market, as support for ZWLR isn’t available there yet. (This is just recollection, as I sit here in the waiting room of my dentist )
Related products, certainly, and clearly share a codebase…
@Agnes was a guest on a podcast quite a while back, and one of the things mentioned IIRC was the advantage of the newer ZWave chips being able to be updated via firmware. So it was a single chip for everything, and just different firmware. So I believe this would mean the ZBox could support the other frequencies with different firmware? Whereas the older chipset in the HC3 could not.
I also remember to read somewhere the newer chips can use other frequenzies with updates.
and the old needed a new chip.
I guess if fibaro/Nice Release a new HC4 with 800 chip it would have worldwide availability.
Nice also own the ELAN system if you guys know about that?
And this is the reason the KNX integration have come to HC3 i guess
That would be cool to see a future HC4 in person here in the US. Especially if advanced DIYers could access it without a dealer.
Yes, I’ve been reading about ELAN.
For large, complicated configurations that looks very interesting. The real “pro” version that could displace Home Assistant (my opinion) since it has the ability to plug in and integrate with literally everything.
The thing that I usually stub my toe on with home automation is anything that rides the network infrastructure in the home, since the average homeowner does a terrible job there… either it is cobbled together by someone who has no idea how to build a network, or it is underfunded, or both. From what I understand, ELAN rides that home’s provided network infrastructure. For a large deployment where the dealer is also designing, installing and maintaining that home network that should work very well. But for the average homeowner, that is a disaster in the making… IMHO.
I have the same thought when I see folks having issues with Shelly IP devices, or Wifi based cameras or remote alarm panels… usually their home network needs work or investment which the average homeowner doesn’t want to do/make. But I am a bit jaded - since my background is network design and integration.
[That said, I have a good friend who’s a network engineer and smart guy, but he has no energy to fix the z-wave mesh in his house. He lives with very delayed automations and button presses, device drops, etc. Would drive me crazy but he just lives with it. I even offered to fix it for him and he won’t let me. LOL]
Have you seen any pricing that may provide an estimate of the cost in $$$ US or CDN for the North American market? Although it would be a pretty powerful platform–and easier for the average user, perhaps–but I wonder if the cost would be as much or more than a similarly powered HA installation?
We have a network where the gear lives (Ubiquity router, managed switches, NAS, VPN, et.al.) as well as ‘home,’ ‘guest,’ and ‘IOT’ networks. Any other suggestions?
I think as @darren.stp mentioned these things can get complex quickly. A few of the switch manufacturers have an “in-between” line between unmanaged and managed switches. Netgear for example calls them “Smart” switches. These are generally much easier to configure as they are more similar to a router (at least all the ones I’ve messed with). I think these would make some of the security setup easier for the average person, assuming they have a router / knowledge to go with it.
I know my network is setup using VLANs. Having everything isolated occasionally is annoying, but it is more secure that way. I don’t even have access to the ZBox as it is isolated to the IOT VLAN. I have a single PC on my network that can be allowed access when needed. When needed I enable that firewall rule, then disable it again as soon as I’m done.
Perhaps I over complicated things, but I ended up with 8 VLANs separating things out.
Probably not for your configuration! (I should have said VLANs for our network, too.) I know there can also be rate-limiting by VLANs in some configurations to give priority to certain devices, based on a number of factors. Ours is basically 3 VLANs at present. There’s also a VPN to our son’s house, so we can do offsite backups–but that may be overkill for most people.
Isn’t it possible to set a firewall rule that lets, say, your main desktop PC initiate a connection to the Z-Box while not letting devices on IoT breach the wall in the other direction? My Z-Box is currently on our ‘home’ VLAN, but probably ought to move to IoT in the future. Have you tried such a firewall rule?
All my machines have pairs of HDDs (local duplicate), then all that data is backed up to the NAS. My important data is backed up to externals which are also kept in pairs and a set are always kept offsite (the offsite set get rotated, so the data gets updated routinely).
Thats exactly the way I have it setup. My PC is the only machine that can access the Zbox, and only the Zbox. Nothing else can access the PC. However I still only enable this rule when needed, its disabled otherwise.
OPNsense makes it nice and easy, quick click and apply.
Hey I’m late to this party tonight! We may need a Zooz discord channel lol
I honestly can find no evidence that I can buy a Fibaro here in the US in NA frequency. But what I do see I get the feeling it will be expensive - $400+Infrastructure. HA would be (far?) less, however it’s fragile (no offense - I love it for sure), and a ‘build your own’ rather than more of an ‘appliance’. I’m thinking Fibaro are targeting the same market as Control4 and others in a Dealer ecosystem, but I’m reading tea leaves at this point trying to understand. (Hands off luxury homeowners ?)
I’m a ‘real world’ guy as opposed to a security obsessed typical IT guy. That said I don’t go too crazy with vlan isolation, but I do have rules between them to a certain extent. Similar to you, there are three primary networks here at home - data, IoT, and guest. Because of ‘ease of use’ with our iPhones, we’d like to have access to all the stuff we use regularly from that one perspective. This results in more than I would like on our data network (things like Sonos and our Apple TVs etc are on the data network rather than IoT) but it is what it is.
What I was really referring to in my previous post was Wireless design. There’s a lot of extenders, low quality mesh, confusion over WPA2 vs 3, coverage issues, etc going on with the propensity to have some gadget from Best Buy or even your ISP to solve all your problems. For my relatively smaller home it is amazing how I have three U7 APs and really I need a 4th to get quality 5G coverage to keep everything totally happy. Those are not cheap and require some configuration. (Had to customize minimum RSSI and power levels to get Alarm.com WiFi cameras to be happy, etc. Man they are finicky.).
What I wound up doing was creating multiple SSIDs bound to the IoT vlan to satisfy some devices that can only handle WPA2 and 2.4. Then others that can do WPA3 w/PMF and 5. Explaining all of that to the average Joe is nearly impossible and can get complicated quickly. So, the average person might just say “this Shelly won’t stay on the network - I should have bought the hardwired Pro model” but really it is a solvable problem on the network side. Add in more particular devices like an IQ Panel and you get more odd issues because of what I believe are bugs in its wireless stack. The alarm guys tend to kill that problem by selling more dedicated Wifi gear from ADC, but really you can get it to work without if you can adjust (dumb down) your wireless network (IMO). (long story there; and waiting to see improvement in the IQ 5.)
The nice thing about Z-wave is it avoids all of this.
As an aside, my SSID’s are all Star Trek references. IoT is “Unimatrix01” and “Unimatrix02” LOL. Guest is “TheresCoffeeInThatNebula”.
Yes, absolutely - depending on the firewall you are using. But for me - I never got around to setting that up at home. In my office, yes, absolutely. (I have a small HA instance there for light automation in its own vlan with some renegade Alexa devices LOL. That is very isolated. Office is Watchguard and home is a UDM Pro.)
Its important. My theory there is elegance. No data on any machine is worth keeping. Convenience cache only. Everything is in cloud or on Synology via sync or real-time access. Synology is backed up to Wasabi, cloud (which is Google Workspace for home and 365 for business) is backed up to a third party with 1 year retention. If my laptop blows up, I buy a new one at Apple and I’m up in an hour or so. My goal is to have as little as possible here to mess with. I need to spend my time testing z-wave devices instead.
In our case, the entire IoT vlan is dumbed down to WPA2 so things like the water heater & irrigation system will even connect! I like your idea of separate SSIDs & will keep that in mind for the future!
Classic! Nicely done. We back up to our local Synology NAS, to our son’s Synology NAS over VPN, and a WD Passport, particularly when on the road. Our Documents folder on the PC is in an encrypted container, as are all backups of same. So far, that’s worked okay…
)
