Zigbee: Any good?

amxhobbyist

Has anyone here integrated a large Zigbee system (3500+ square feet) using the AMX Zigbee gateway? How well does the entire system work? Is this something you install and it "just works", or is it fidgety and prone to problems?

I have a bunch of Radia devices I pulled out of my old home, however I'm still on the fence as to whether I want to retrofit my new home for Radia. If a Zigbee solution is worthwhile, I'd be inclined to go that route, but I'm worried about reliability and speed. Insteon and Z-Wave are billed as being reliable products, but Insteon forums are littered with complaints (seems like a marginal improvement on X-10, which is worthless) and I've seen at least some comments that Z-Wave can be agonizingly slow in larger installations.

Any thoughts or direction on Zigbee as a viable retrofit solution and/or how well the AMX integration behaves would be appreciated.

vining

I wouldn't say X-10 is worthless. They still work fairly reliable for the most part. Have you considered UPB devices which is another power line carrier (PLC) type device that's extremely reliable.

Zigbee itself is very reliable but is bandwidth limited. It's used very successfully in industrial applications and the newest Zigbee Pro version is supposed to have a vast improvement on how it handles and routes traffic. I don't know what Z-Wave uses for their gateways or how their communications protocol works. The devices themselves may be chatty which isn't a good thing for any zigbee network. They should speak only when spoken too or used and shouldn't be polled by some centralized brain.