My Shelly devices are all dying - should I direct replace them or look for alternatives?

[young moth]

I've mostly Gen1 shelly devices, several 2.5, L1, i3... they have been a pain in the ass, some having repeated dropouts of the wifi network and all required special settings to have them working with HASS, but most of the time were minimally reliable.

But now they are all dying?!?!?! what's happening? they start emiting issing noises and then they completly dye.

Are the new gen Shelly devices are more reliable? should I keep Shelly wifi or change to other protocols?

I'm a Z-wave fan, but normally devices carry an premium price tag.

Zigbee is ok, there are lots of good price alternatives (being able to avoid Tuya or Aqara devices) but the mesh is very fragile.

Wifi devices are easy to implement, inexpensive and since I've very good coverage I can easily cover all house and the garden, but they take IP addresses and stress the wifi network.

What should I invest on? cheap zigbee devices, expensive Z-wave, keep away from shelly? are other more reliable and accessible brand?

I would like to hear from you.

Best,

[hollow wagon]

some thoughts:

I have a bunch of shelly devices and haven't had any issues with them but the majority of them are newer gens so maybe older ones give more issues. are you overdriving them with inductive loads or something? is your power particularly noisy?

the gen4 shelly devices have the option to use wifi or zigbee on the same device so that gives you some options if you change your mind etc.

z-wave does have a premium price tag. I think its mostly that less of them are made so they dont get to the economies of scale. a bunch of the shelly ones are now in the works with home assistant program.

I recently started using zigbee devices with the new ZBT-2 coordinator and its been good so far. but admittedly I spent some time to plan and intentionally put a bunch of smart plugs around the house to help build out the mesh. a mesh is only as reliable as you make it.

some people hate on wifi but if you have a decent AP then realistically its not going to cause much of an issue having a few sensors. as for "take an ip address"... if your running out then change your network ip addressing scheme to something more appropriate for your network setup.

[young moth]

My power network is fairly noise free, that isn't the question for sure.

The web is full of bad reports about Shelly gen1 devices. I believe the new ones can be better but the question is I don't want to give Shelly more money if I can avoid it - they don't deserve it. The worst thing would be to buy Shelly direct replacements and after a few years have them dead again.

I've Z-wave devices with more than 10 years and going strong, thinking I complained about Fibaro being very fragile. There are very few alternatives and less accesible ones.

Zigbee is like hit and miss, sometimes I get a lemon, sometimes they're great. Normally are affodable.

For how many years do you have your Shellys? Any other brands you can recomend?

[hollow wagon]

I have got about 30 shelly devices, a load are in the 2 or 3 year old range.
I have a few gen1 EM devices.
devices wont last forever but ~5 years would probably be what I would be happy with I think.
tbh a bunch of the reports and failures I take with a pinch of salt because they end up being someone putting a big inductive load on it and then going all surprised Pikachu when their misused device fails (not saying that is what happened with yourself but its true of loads of posts)

in general I do recommend shelly and i would encourage you to try their newer devices. however if you dont want to because of bad experiences I totally get it.

recommendations would probably vary depending on exact use case and also what country you are in.

[fallow radish]

There's a known issue with one of the capacitors in Gen1 devices. AFAIK there haven't been any problems with newer generations.

[young moth]

But was this solved on latter generations? or should I avoid Shelly completely?

[fallow radish]

Like I said - AFAIK there haven’t been any problems newer generations

And that problematic capacitor was changed

[storm cedar]

for what it's worth, i have a ~1yo gen3 starting to drop wifi on a regular basis since a week