have always wanted a smart home. Even back when I was a kid, I dreamt about being able to just say things and then have it happen. A bit like Knight Rider, but with my house. Thanks to the rapid advancement of technology resulting in amazing gadgets like the Vera Plus, that dream is now coming true for me and many other tech geeks.
I have been writing this post over a few months. I started writing it when I first purchased the Vera Plus. But as I knew very little about home automation back then, I decided I would first use it extensively, see if it could do everything I wanted it to do and then write a detailed review about my experience. And that time has come, 6 months on.
Hands-on Review: Vera Plus Z-Wave Smart Home Controller
The Competition
Samsung SmartThings vs. Vera Plus
A smart hub that started out strongly but under Samsung’s watch has become a total mess. The culprit is its reliance on the cloud for processing rules/scenes. Just head over to the Smart Things forum and have a look at what the owners are going through. The poor extremely poor and unreliable cloud platform and utter disregard for existing users is what put me off Samsung SmartThings and I am glad.
Heck, it doesn’t even have a proper rules/scenes engine after the excellent 3rd party developer of Rules Engine was forced to stop development!
SmartThings, Samsung’s smart home subsidiary, has had a large number of complaints about glitches with its smart home hub posted on its community message board and Reddit in recent weeks. Users called the system “fatally flawed,” and reported that their devices randomly disconnect from the system or turn on or off without command. One user, Shelley Powers, wrote that the hub repeatedly made her lights switch on and her home alarm system go off for no reason, CNET reported.
Rule Machine, a smart home app for making smart home devices perform complex tasks, withdrew support for SmartThings last week, citing these technical problems.
Vera Plus vs. Fibaro HomeCentre 2
This is another Z-Wave smart home controller that is often compared to the Vera Plus. Even if performance, features and reliability were comparable (and they are not), the Vera Plus costs a fraction of the HC2. So the Vera Plus is much better value of money.
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