comments:
Nothing will ever beat Caseta**, but I can't argue about the price. When I moved to a larger home, I spent an entire day removing all the Caseta switches and swapping them with dumb ones so that I could use the Caseta's in my new home, but they basically only covered 2/3 of the new house, so I had to decide what to use in my basement where it didn't matter as much if there were issues. I used Kasa switches down there, but honestly... I probably wouldn't again. They're...fine. But depending on how many switches we're talking about, your wireless network can get pretty out of hand if you use a lot of wifi products. In my home and at work, I push all my wifi stuff to channels 6 and 11, and free up the lower end for my zigbee network (which is set to zigbee channel 25). Unfortunately, there's not as many Zigbee switches on the market. Inovelli makes great ones, but they're even more expensive than Caseta! I've started using dimmers from Enbrighten and I highly recommend them. I DO NOT recommend switches by MOES, which are cheaply made to the point of being scary. You can also go with ZWave for even better range and reliability, but those products are usually pricier due to different licensing structures. If you're building out an entire smart home all at once, and trying to keep costs down a bit, I'd probably suggest sticking to zigbee. A strong enough zigbee mesh will be pretty darn reliable. I HIGHLY recommend checking out Third Reality zigbee products because they're very reasonably priced, still good quality, and I like that they're designing most of their battery-powered devices to take standard AAA's. I'll stop there for my piece. The last bit I'll say is that I really like Aqara locks, but I really hate Aqara hubs. I'd suggest pairing your lock directly to an Apple TV or something. But I seem to be in the minority here. *edit* **I meant to say for reliability, and nothing that you can buy right now. I am one of the many who consider Caseta products to basically be magic. Perfect reliability, and they last forever. The ones I moved out of my old house? Some of them were in my old home for almost 8 years. I ripped them all out of the walls and installed them in my new home where they've performed perfectly for another 2 years. Yes, I'm a Caseta cultist.