Home Automation w/IQ4 and Zooz - My Experience so far

Experience
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Home Automation w/IQ4 and Zooz - My Experience so far
experience 5.0 1
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I just thought I’d share some of my recent discoveries as it relates to Zooz products. For background I’m using the IQ4 panel.

I’ve implemented several Zooz products including the ZEN32 Scene Controllers, ZEN16 Multi-Relay, ZEN71 and ZEN76 on/off switch, and ZEN04 smart plug and ZEN14 Outdoor smart plugs. Each time I read the details I find new interesting features, so I thought I’d share some of my adventures/findings:

On the ZEN16, I connected it to a 12v power supply and used a Seco-Larm strobe and siren to create a configurable remote siren for my garage. This also has the benefit of the strobe being visible from my garage window in the event of an emergency as it can be seen from the street. I boxed it all up in a plastic project box and the power supply is on a UPS (that was existing in my garage for my cameras).

With the ZEN32 Scene controller, I realized that in addition to triggering scenes in Alarm.com, I also could use direct association in the IQ4 panel to associate a button to another Zooz device. So, for example there is a button that directly turns on/off a light in that room; making the scene controller actually 5 wall switches in one! And this doesn’t rely on the cloud/Alarm.com to fire since it is a direct association.

Also you can order custom buttons for the ZEN32 with pre etched labels for each button for a professional clean look.

That same direct association seems to work well between all of the Zooz products. It opens doors to a lot of creativity.

The ZEN76 wall switch is a gem because you can integrate it in a 3 or 4 way circuit and leave all the other switches as-is! (You don’t need to replace all the other switches in the circuit.). While that was cool enough, I found after install that they show up in alarm.com as REMOTES! [Once I enabled the remote feature via parameter 10 (see below)] Now in addition to turning that light on/off, I can trigger scenes from the same unassuming light switch. [So now when the dog gets me up at 530 to do his business, I disarm the panel, then double press the hall light switch and the pathway through my house to the back door, the landscape lights, and yard lights all illuminate so I’m not walking in the dark. Very cool.]

Update: The ZEN71 also shows up as Remotes just like the ZEN76 and works equally well.

The ZEN14 double plug now (as of yesterday’s announced beta) is independently controllable in Alarm.com (and really always was direct in the IQ4 panel). This lets me keep the outdoor holiday inflatables and lights on different schedules.

Parameters. In the Zooz directions you can access all the ZWave parameters available and program them from the IQ4 panel direct into each device. Some parameters are what you’d expect - LED color, behavior, etc, but some are very cool - like on or off TIMERS! Which is very useful since we can’t mimic a timer in alarm.com at present. (Like, when this switch turns on by a physical button press, turn it off automatically 30 mins later. Useful for a shower or closet light, etc). You can also invert behavior and more. Lots of gold in those detailed parameter options.

The bummer: After talking with support I’ve found that these Zooz switches do not handle non-resistive loads, like those from a shower fan, for instance. Only their dry contact products would work in that case. So for those instances I’m using GE or Leviton for switch control.

Ok, I’ll stop geeking out for now, but it seems the longer I look at the details the more I can actually do with the system. The other factor here is that, for our house, all this home automation has to work without the app, and without any instructions. It has to be completely intuitive. This is because no one else in the house has any desire to use the app or the panel to control any of this or kick off any scenes. Physical buttons of some sort are a must.

PS: I have nothing to do with Zooz… just a customer…

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I share your enthusiasm about Zooz products, especially now that we have multi-channel support. $30ish for 3 relays on the ZEN16 is a great value!

I have a ZEN20 on the way to try it out next week. Hopefully all 5 channels work. :crossed_fingers:

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My most recent purchase was the ZAC36 Water Valve Actuator (black Friday sale it was a great deal).

I won’t be installing it until the spring as its intended use is to control the shutoff for my irrigation system. Each spring and fall I have to crawl in the very tight crawlspace to turn the valve, and if this works out I’ll be able to save myself some wear and tear on my knees! Looking forward to it.

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Have you tested the ZEN14 with Alarm.com and seen both endpoints working as expected?

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Funny you should ask. I have three Zen14’s, all for outside holiday lights.

This is all new, but I noticed last night during the shut off schedule, it didn’t seem to fire the ‘turn off’ command on all of the outlets (as per the activity log) HOWEVER all power was off on the units!! When I looked in alarm.com, certain outlets appeared as powered on, but they really were off. ( I did not check the IQ4 panel for status at that time.)

Right now, these same lights came on at sunset. I can see the schedule (per the activity log) didn’t fire on all the outlets again, but it missed DIFFERENT outlets than it missed last night (?)? However, I just went out and checked, and all outlets have power, even though if I look in Alarm.com, it shows one outlets as being powered off. When I look at that same outlet in the IQ4 panel, it shows the correct status as being powered on. Here are screenshots. It is Driveway Holiday Right (60.1)

On in Panel (and real life):

IMG_1447
IMG_14471920×2203 166 KB

Off in Alarm.com:

Screenshot 2024-12-15 at 5.53.28 PM
Screenshot 2024-12-15 at 5.53.28 PM2392×1206 249 KB

PS: If I manually command the outlets from Alarm.com, they do turn on/off independently as they should. It just seems that the status when a schedule fires is not completely accurate?

PPS: Manual commands from the IQ Panel work as well, but they always did. :slight_smile:

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Thanks for posting this. I’m investigating using some zen58’s and wondering if you guys have tried them.

I’m interested in using the inputs separated from the outputs. Power them with 12v. Pretty cool they can be used to act like water sensors etc on the S inputs.

Do all of the relays on these zooz devices only show as ‘lights’ or can we make them other things? Like if I made a zen58 a water sensor with a long sensor probe. Can I get the iqp4 to treat it like a water sensor?

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Hi @pounce ,

Since I posted that last year, I’ve developed a Youtube channel and a direct relationship with Zooz evaluating products. Its been a very fun experience so far!

I’ve done quite a bit with the ZEN58 (it has become my favorite relay for low voltage things) and I’ve featured it on my Youtube channel a few times. The team at Zooz also asked me to do some testing scenarios for them on the IQ4 with the ZEN16 and ZEN58 one of which was this exact separation of input and output.

Unfortunately, in general, the IQ 4 refuses to allow anything z-wave to be a sensor. This continued to hold true with the ZEN16 and ZEN58 in my testing.

I applied the parameter to separate input and output, did the re-join of the device, and nothing happened. In other words the input never shows up as a distinct entity anywhere in IQ 4 or ADC. (Of course if I join it to a different zwave hub - like ZWave JS UI (Home Assistant), Z-Box, etc - the input pops right up.

So, in the end, most of these just show up as a switch.

BUT the ZEN58 does have one magic feature that no other zwave relay I’ve tried has - and that is it does show the input as a REMOTE in Alarm.com!!

This is super handy, as on that input you can tie scenes to Single press, multiple press (2-5x presses), and Held Down actions! I’ve used this as a mini ‘interface’ as it were from foreign systems to trigger a bunch of things in the IQ 4 / ADC world.

And just to be super clear - there is one other low voltage device that has this remote appearance feature - the Shelly i4 DC - but the issue with the Shelly is it shows a constant error on the IQ 4 panel since it is an unknown device. For that reason I’d not recommend its use in production, but it does have 4 inputs each with multiple press scene controls.

So for your use case of a water sensor you could of course use any of the various IQ or PowerG water sensors, or even something like a PG9945 with an external water sensor probe, or an external probe running to a Hardwire PowerG or Hardwire IQ. I have made water sensors from third party external probes and even float switches wired into the PG9945 (and I think ?? the PG9309) with success.

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That sounds interesting, but I’m not sure what it means. So if you can’t separate the input from the dry contact relay you can still trigger off the input? Admittedly, I haven’t yet played around with much of the rules because I have 3 other home control systems. In the home I’d imagine the zen57 line powered version would be a better option if the inputs work the same in alarm.com. Use a momentary switch in an box.

The interest in the zen58 wasn’t really as a water sensor. It was to use a pair as an alternate to a new PGP-IO9 Powerg+ IO device that has 4 inputs or 2 inputs and two outputs. I need the two inputs and 2 outputs configuration.

Looks like my options are the PGP-IO9 or a wireless to wired adapter to get the pgm and inputs.

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In alarm.com/ IQ4; there are two types of inputs - one is a sensor input which primarily is at the IQ4 level, and the other is a scene controller which usually is a z-wave device.

The sensors can trigger a variety of actions but one thing they typically cannot trigger is a scene.

The scene controllers can only trigger a scene, but cannot trigger an individual action (unless that action is contained within a scene.). Note that scene controllers are called ‘remotes’ in alarm.com.

(One day I plan on doing a video and creating a full grid of which triggers can spark which actions in ADC/IQ4; but I have not gotten there yet. It isn’t straightforward since ADC treats each source sensor differently, and options inside the adc app, website, etc only appear when you have a device in the system that possesses that capability! So you may not know about remotes since it may be invisible to you until you add the right z-wave device to your system. They try to think for you which at times is frustrating. But I digress.)

All of that said -
If you have a scene controller (like a Zooz light switch, or other device that supports scenes), when you go into the ADC website (not the app!) under Automations, you’ll see a ‘remotes’ tab at the top of the screen. In there you’ll see every device where the input can cause a scene to trigger. You’ll also be able to assign different behaviors for single, double, and other multi-tap actions on each remote input. Note that you can ONLY trigger a SCENE with these triggers. Not anything else.

So, if you can do it with a scene it is possible via this method.

However there are drawbacks: These are a little slower than triggering directly off a SENSOR, since the alarm.com cloud is involved (even though some of this is downloaded to the IQ4, it is slightly slower.). By contrast if you trigger an automation off of a contact sensor - like back door open turns on a light - that would be much faster because that runs locally on the IQ4 panel. (There are caveats and shades of grey here of course.)

The PGPIO9 would be considered a SENSOR input and enjoy those particular available actions specific to the selected Sensor Group in the IQ 4.

If you can tell me exactly what you are trying to read/write with the input/outputs on the PGP-IO9 I may be able to help more.

(Edited to make more clear)

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Zen57 vs zen58

Specific to this - yes, the 57 and 58 are very comparable. If you power with line voltage, the 57 is the right choice. 58 is for low voltage. Depends on your source power and use case.

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Thanks for the detail. Appreciate it. In general I side with doing things locally. I integrate to iqp4 using the control4 integration to automate outside of iqp4 using sensor events.

I have a separate recent thread here on the forum about the PGP-IO9 and wanting to use it to integrate a Watercop Pro water shutoff valve. Rather than side track your nice Z-Wave thread I’m happy to continue there if you are feeling generous.

I’ve been on the fence about adding any zwave to iqp4. I don’t want to negatively impact my life safety system and iqp4 is never going to have the features of my hubitat, Josh or Control4 when it comes to Z-Wave. However, if I can get functionality with zwave that isn’t offered with powerg(+) then I’m going to do what’s needed.

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Got it. Honestly in your particular case, I like your approach. I’d stick with PowerG // PowerG+ on the IQ4 for the life safety and keep any zwave (and other home automation) in purpose built platforms; then integrate where you can. The control4 interface is rather nice and allows that to work rather well. I’ve not used the watercop but it looks like a solid solution.

I’ll read through that other thread and let you know if I think of anything helpful. In general I think you have two choices (assuming you are driving the aux in on the watercop) - either monitor water sensors and trigger the closure of the watercop in automation (maybe control4 or hubitat) ; or do it in IQ4; but maybe not straddle the two environments for the best stability and performance. I’d hate for an integration somewhere to fail and the valve not be triggered when needed.

On the zwave side, you can use a zwave water sensor(s) directly associated to the relay (say, zen58) to trigger the watercop. With direct association even if your hubitat was offline it would trigger.
(At least I’m 99% sure this would work as desired I’d have to bench test it.)