Why Z-Wave?

[philgood]

I've been attempting home automation since the X-10 days with enough successes to overcome the failures.  From my experience Insteon seemed to be on the right track for the most part, but then I started hearing about some of the newer, better methods such as Z-Wave,  Zigbee and now Matter.  I bought into Z-Wave a few years ago and again had moderate success until the day when something went wrong and portions of my Z-Wave system stopped working.  This is when I learned how different Insteon and Z-Wave are, with Insteon having hard-coded addresses and Z-Wave addresses assigned on Inclusion. So if I understand this correctly, there is no way to identify the specific physical Z-Wave device from the list of devices, like you can with Insteon.

Is there an advantage to this that I am just not understanding?

Is there any sort of troubleshooting method to identifying what Z-Wave devices are still apart of the network and which ones are lost, besides the obvious trying to communicate with them individually?

Since trying to resolve my problems with restoring my Z-Wave backup failed to produce a positive result, I am about ready to delete all the Z-Wave devices and just start over.  So frustrating!

Thanks for reading.

[lilyoyo1]

While insteon devices have codes that show up in the system, it would take the same amount of work to figure out what devices are which just like zwave if you do not rename them while adding. Yes, you can walk around and check devices to find the number, but that's highly inefficient at best if you have a large number of devices to look through. 

The best way to figure anything out would be to to on each device one at a time to see what device turns on in the console. Once you figure that out, rename your switch. I always left the number in front of my zwave devices with the name I wanted to go by. 

Personally, I would factory reset everything and start with a clean slate. If you want to go the deletion route, start with the devices that are farthest away and choose remove device. Then move closer to your controller. This method assumes that your devices are newer devices that support network wide inclusion/exclusion 

[jec6613]

Z-wave also runs into network contention on big networks, so I find them less than ideal with a big install.

However, Z-Wave offers higher security and some interesting devices that do not exist in Insteon, so along with me 150+ Insteon devices I have 50 or so Z-Wave as well.  All of the ISY variants allow them to work seamlessly together.

Edited February 7 by jec6613