Aerotec Zigbee extender

Lounge
#1

I’ve ordered One of them:

It sound promising.
Any real experience with It ?

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#2

I use their Z-Wave extender and it helped a lot in my case. The downside is that you lose a power outlet so the usual recommendation is to get an outlet that can act as an extender.

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#3

I have some of the ZigBee smart plugs, as @avataru suggested, with one currently attached to core, and it seems to be working well. It reports power usage more consistently than what I saw on HE, no 65K spikes, and has a good link quality score.

Now that I will be able to do away with my conbee2 mesh for Ikea switches, and the fact they are reporting power usage, I will be able to use them all on the same mesh and in some automations.

#4

I got a bunch of the IRIS (centralite) outlets off of ebay dirt cheap (~5.00 each) which do zigbee and zwave repeating (simultaneously) along with power reporting and on off switching. I have about 15 of these in the house and I have ZERO issues with my mesh and slowdowns.

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#5

Aeotec is a good brand. I have their Extender 6 and it does very well for my Z-Wave mesh. If I needed something of the sort, I’d trust it.

It being zigbee, almost any plug, (I use innr) will do. I think that they will be good, but maybe not as necessary as they would be with Z-Wave. I don’ t know that I’d spend the money on it.

I would be interested in hearing about your experience with it, though. They might offer something that we’re not seeing. And the price is actually affordable for it being Aeotec.

#6

I have a bunch of Aeotec Z-Wave stuff in my house and must say that there are two things to watch out for:

  1. At least with the Australian version, the Smart Switch 6 smart plug is hot garbage. I have 4 across two different versions and they have a radio range of about 4m and refuse to pair unless right on top of the hub, and once paired, refuse to work with the mesh properly. I have had this problem across multiple software versions, and currently on 3.0 still not right. I did not realise before with the Hubitat ZWave implementation but these devices were a major source of mesh instability for me. They are going in the bin, or possibly I will find a use for them in the same room as the Core, where they work OK.
  2. They don’t supply their firmware updates as anything other than a windows executable, which means that you pretty much have to remove devices from the mesh, update them, and then put them back in the mesh. Alternatively, you can join a Z-Stick 5 or whatever to your Core mesh and push them out that way, but this is not always reliable I have found.

I don’t think that Aeotec is very healthy from a financial standpoint either. They are having great difficulty supplying their newer products with 700 series chipsets, particularly in my market. I am going to steer away from them, which is a shame, since the nano-switch is an excellent product, and the nano-dimmer does very well for a non-neutral requiring smart dimmer.

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#7

I have 3 innr plugs (plus 3 Ikea repeaters) and I like them a lot.
I am in the middle of transition, so I must have 2 zigbee networks (One for CORE e One for HE) until I’ll find a decent way to integrate CORE/Z2M with Alexa. So I’m looking for some more repeaters…

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#8

Just arrived. First attemps to pair it with sonoff controller failed.
I’ll let you know about

EDIT: finally I paired the extender. It is both a signal amplifier and a router. The signal strongly improved. The device is unsupported by z2m (that is: it is correctly working, but z2m does not have infos, as device picture, about. nevermind)

#9