I have been using a variety of Zooz switches going on 2 years now. The earlier 20 series switches were personally my favorite since the they have a very distinct click and the new 70 series are softer.
As far as reliability they’ve actually been perfect in talking to both a Nortek Combo dongle and the new Zooz 800 series stick directly on home assistant. Now there are a few caveats:
-
I’ve had terrible luck with Zooz Relays, I cannot keep the things in sync with HA and I’ve been too busy to troubleshoot it further. I can’t recommend these at this time.
-
Zooz dimmers can be picky about the LED bulbs you use, I would advise avoiding dimmers or only getting 1 dimmer to test the bulbs you plan on using. You may get bulbs that are “dimmable” but then end up flickering regardless of being “anti flicker”, and the lowest sim setting IMO isn’t that dim. The only bulbs I have that work well were a clearance bulb from a local hardware store and they no longer stock them so if I end up replacing them in the future I may swap from Dimmers to Smart Bulbs + Smart Switches
-
I had one that was DOA but Zooz support sent a replacement in just a couple of days, so support was reasonable.
Welcome, doing the same myself. I wasn’t much of a contributor prior to the great migration and I’m trying to step up my contributions in order to help grow things.
Personally my entry into Home Assistant and Smarthome was to fix a very strange series of light switches in my house that all turned on or off different lights in 1 area and I used a series of smart switches, smart bulbs and lighting groups to make them all controlled as if they were on circuit, as the cost to do so electrically was prohibitive.
Now my automations are mostly to check on the state of the house and report problems. Such as if the door to the laundry room is left closed too long (as the litterbox is in there) and to check on the state of battery powered devices to see if batteries need replaced.
I try to keep the automations simple and unobtrusive.