ktautomate

I have 7+ years of experience with multiple valve automation types. I started with a Z-Wave DomeHA Water Main shutoff. Fortunately, I never had experience with "all on" issue. However, as a strap over the pipe and clamp onto the actuator type valve closer there was always a wee bit of play in the valve closing process. Sometimes when I attempted to close it would remain what appeared to be a slight bit open. The regular issue I encountered is unrequested shutoffs. No water sensor was tripped no request sent. Just decided to close. I admit that "failure" is much less concerning than unexpected opening of the valve. Either way it was enough to erode confidence in a Z-Wave device. Consequently, I shifted to a hard wired (24VAC hard wired relay), price was 6-10x the price of the cheap valve actuator and I had to pay another couple hundred to have it plumbed into the line. But you know the saying, you get what you pay for. The Elk replacement was one of the best moves I've made in my system. It's completely bullet proof. I've ever had a failed close, I've never had an unrequested open. It's truly amazing. If you can't afford a hard-wired valve controller you might wanna make sure you have a low insurance deductable, cause all it will take is one flood claim to make you wish you'd put in something that will really work, and work FAST (current versions close in less than 1 second).

Love the responses posted already. If it wasn't all to clear I have little interest in taking dependency on cloud service provider (one of the most awesome capabilities of EISY is it's ability to "run local"). I had held out some hope that there might be a common api interface that a sufficiently large community of device builders might be building with. Sounds like the two giants in the room Goog&Amzn are getting device builders to follow their whims leaving the rest of the community to build plugins against the devices as they ship. I won't count my "hope" hopeless yet. I will try to find and buy a couple devices that already have plugins published to see how good/cumbersome the experience is and go from there. I spent over a decade at a VERY large software company so I understand the challenge it is to continue to flourish when all the rest of a community has to align with the "recurring revenue" (subscriptioin) solutions. I laud UD and this community and look forward to participating and hopefully contributing to the community over time. Thanks All.... Look forward to a couple followup posts to this thread following my attempt with https://polyglot.universal-devices.com

I have decades of experience with Z-Wave with HAI (Leviton). I'm transitioning to Z-Wave with EISY. I'm VERY impressed with what EISY brings to the table. What I'm trying to understand is if I use EISY to control the newer Wifi (google and alexa capable) devices that are exploding on the market. I have zero interest in running google home or using alexa. What I would like to do however is leverage: the much cheaper/plentiful smart devices. Wifi smart devices are ~75% less than Z-Wave). The rate of new devices hitting the market seem to be blowing away the number of z-wave decvices. my existing reliable Wifi network over a much slower and less reliable z-wave topology. So, my question are: 1. Can I use EISY to manage devices like those made by GHome https://www.amazon.com/stores/page/0824DEE2-9A3E-4FF2-B0C6-91D84D5C20FC (I'm not advocating for GHome, it's just the easiest example I found on Amazon)? 2. If it's possible, are there best practices anyone can recommend?