disappointed so far in VeraLite... have I chosen poorly?

[JoeStrout]

I'm sorry, I must be dangerously close to an annoyance threshold, but I feel you're saying something really fundamental and important that I'm just not getting.

How can you have your lights both controlled by regular wall switches, and controlled by Z-wave actuators?

The only arrangement I can think of is that the wall switch cuts the power to the actuator, which kills the light but also drops it out of the Z-wave network, and in the morning, you have to use the wall switch to turn the lights back on, and then you get Z-wave control again. But this means that when a light is off, you don't know (without looking) whether to reach for the wall switch, or the Z-wave controller. Is that it, or is there a more clever arrangement I'm not thinking of?

[Sparkman]

@JoeStrout Likely with something like these: http://aeotec.com/z-wave-in-wall-switches. There are other manufacturers such as Fibaro that make similar devices. I use a few of the Aeotec as well.

Cheers
Al

[hek]

Yep, I'm mainly use Fibaro wall switches for the lights.

[Dwalt]

@JoeStrout Your slow response time is not typical of Vera and is most likely related to your devices, connection or app. My Vera performs as near to instantaneously as other controllers I have tested. It has drawbacks (ask any Vera owner) but has huge upsides, specifically the versatility and community development.

[JoeStrout]

@Dwalt you may be right... I tested with some other Vera remote apps, and was still getting 10-20 seconds response time for my switch, so I tried rebooting the Vera unit. Now it is near-instantaneous.

So, maybe that's something I just have to do now and then. As long as it's not too frequent (and maybe only after installing new devices), I can live with that.

[BulldogLowell]

Your Vera will restart nightly. So you should not have to do that.

Each night it will optimize your zwave network automatically so you need to think about that if you add a device.

Once you get past the steep curve of adding a bunch of devices, it will be very reliable.

Unless you overload it with lots of plugins.

[soward]

Once connected to the Vera, commands should propagate fairly rapidly. Even 'virtual' commands which are actually scenes that perform complex multi-device actions typically take < 1 second.

However the initial connection to the device from an App or service can take quite some time, and can, as you saw, sometimes simply not work.

For this reason, and because not everyone has said Apps on their devices, I have a few strategically placed Z-wave table-top remotes configured such that their programmable buttons can control some key things for which there is no matching physical switch (i.e. garage door, curtains, etc) and to toggle groups of lights (all basement, all outdoor, etc)

[naveen]

Try out the web-browser interface. I have a 'webapp' at a tile on iOS. Still takes some time to boot, but much faster than the vera app. Slightly laggier but you get more features as well.

[davvvvvo]

The Imperihome app for me has been the fastest app for changing the state of the lights, locks ect and looks the best imo. Once set up you will noticed a big improvement. Also if your Vera lite changes its ip address all the time then that would slow you down in loading the app to. Best to truly judge your set up the next day, when Vera has done it's nightly heal and matches up all the node in relation to where the other ones are.

[Dean]

I don't have any experience with iPhone, but I can confirm that the Vera app is horribly slow. When my Vera 3 was on UI5, that app was heaps quicker. I've recently took the plunge and upgraded to UI7, but the app for that is just too slow to be useful I reckon. I have an android phone and use Autovera which is instantaneous. I also have Imperihome running on an android tablet and it too is quick.

My experience too is that it has made very little difference between communicating with a zwave switch or a Mysensors switch with regards to speed.