“I bought this to upgrade my Vera Edge, which was no longer getting updates. I had 29 devices to transfer across, but this was fairly straightforward. Compared with the Vera, the Home Center is much more capable and user friendly, and was straightforward to set up. Technical support from Vesternet was superb as always.”
“Fibaro HC3 Review
Suitable for the beginner or the commercial expert.
I have just replaced my seven year old Vera Edge z-wave hub with a Fibaro Home Center 3, having also tried for a week to move to a Hubitat Elevation C-8.
The Vera had served me reasonably well, supporting door switches that allowed me to be emailed when they opened, a sensor wired into my existing door bell, flood sensors, 3in1 sensors, two electric Somfy blinds and half a dozen plug adapters for lights, chargers and the Christmas tree. But, its app wasn’t very rich, notifications were limited and whilst the logic setup was GUI driven, it was limited.
I wanted a ‘better’ app with dashboard, a better windows dash, better GUI logic builder, more flexible notifications.
I did not want to be messing around with code for drivers, nor to be reliant on others in the community for these.
My recent week long experience with the Hubitat involved too much hacking about to find / install community written drivers for my Fibaro door switches and my Fibaro roller shutter switch for the blinds. Its rule builder was good but I found the dashboard to be uninspiring. The alerting via the app was decent but I would have needed to hack about to get email support on top of the push alerts.
I therefore moved on to the HC3. It is twice the price of other hubs but I have found it four times easier and more fun than the others so if you can afford it…
2/3 of my devices are Fibaro, undoubtedly it is good to be within one family. The others, plug modules and sirens did all include easily and work fine.
I like:
Logic builder is GUI driven and easy. But, I can see the LUA script if I wish to.
Alerting is a simple matter of ticking a box and includes a push to ipad and phone as well as email.
Icons are easily changed and there are plenty of alternatives on the forums.
Icons include more than on/off status within them, eg battery life, last activation.
I can change device parameters via the GUI. Useful when I don’t always fully understand what I’m doing when following instructions from the forums.
I have had no reliability issues in my first few weeks.
I like the idea of the hub supporting Zigbee and z-wave. Support for zigbee may be weaker but I haven’t had to cross that bridge and will continue to focus on z-wave if I can.
Vesternet: Over seven years, I have bought all of my kit from Vesternet and wouldn’t hesitate to recommend them. They have given good advice and been responsive. Prices have been competitive but even if they were a few pounds out, I’d want to maintain the relationship.”
“Wow! Stark contrast in quality and performance compared to one other that I do have. Solid. Think drag and drop lego blocks for your rules (or what kids learn - Scratch). I also get to learn the Lua language for more complex rules. Great so far and I hope it stays this way!”
“FIBARO Controller is a nice product but the segment of wireless home automation systems is changing very rapidly, and focused manufacturers have to be right there with products meeting those standards, which unfortunately is not the case with FIBARO.
Though it is the strongest manufacturer for Z-Wave devices, none of them is with the latest Gen7 Z-wave version. Yet now the era is of Z-Wave LR.
Every new Z-Wave generation has a lot of advantages to it, so then why still live in Gen5.
The world is changing at a faster speed with GUI's having simplicity for the use to easily create flows, scenes, triggers, events, and any combination with a drag and drop, while Fibaro is yet keeping it's boxes locked for the installer dependency and management via installer app is only possible by certified installers.
They can communicate only to Z-Wave, while several other controllers now support all the wireless devices - Zigbee, wireless, Bluetooth, rf this gives you much bigger flexibility to bring in all your devices into one platform.”
“I have now, more or less, completed my second installation of an HC3 having had serious and increasing troubles with a well known alternative hub which is now no longer supported by its manufacturer.
The Home Center 3 is in a league of its own by comparison, though it partly achieves this by having a full range of devices manufactured in the same stable. The facilities and reporting systems I find impressive, though it would be nice to have access to a central library of model scenes and icons. I considered using the HC3 Lite but had to stay with the HC3 because of capacity and availability of Lua programming.
Support from Vesternet is good, and that from Fibaro very good though sometimes difficult to get speedy replies.
Certainly the one to go for if you're starting out”
“This is exactly what I was looking for. A controller that executes a command without hesitation, and very stable. Pairing all the module can take a while, but at the end this replacement was needed.”
