Control is, obviously, one of the most important variables in a smart home system. Gathering enough devices to be able to create enhanced groups and automations is one thing, but then you have to figure out how you are going to control all of it, and there are so many ways to pull it off. One of ours is wirelessly using small, convenient smart remotes like the Zooz ZEN37 Z-Wave 800LR Wall Remote.
Being able to walk around with a physical remote vs having to be tethered to a touchscreen or your phone is both cost-effective and friendly. It allows your remote to move around to where you need it, and Z-Wave makes it so easy to deeply configure it to do what you need. To make things even sweeter, the ZEN37 Wall Remote is rechargeable, which means no more having to swap out coin cell batteries over time.
This remote offers four customizable buttons that can be configured in multiple layers depending on how many times you press a button or how long you press it. Giving you plenty of instructions that you can assign to it to help lift your smart home into a deeply controllable atmosphere with nothing more than this small remote.
It works with multiple smart home environments/ecosystems, including SmartThings, Home Assistant, Hubitat, and more. Really, it works with any system that supports Z-Wave.
It is designed to take on the appearance of a smart wall switch/controller. Using its included wall plate, you can install it anywhere on a wall without the need to play with wires. Simply find a spot that blends in with your other switches (or a spot of its own) and mount it. You can even fit it into a multi-switch plate. Although it looks like a normal switch/controller, it is actually magnetically mounted and can be detached and brought anywhere.
Of course, you don’t have to mount it at all if you don’t want to, as the wall plate is simply a decor feature to give you a place for it to call home. You can opt to skip that step completely and just set the remote by itself somewhere, like we did with one of them, since we moved it all over the place, giving it challenges to knock out (control, trigger, etc). After testing it in a few scenarios here, we took it to the home of one of our colleagues to test it against a few scenarios there. All of which, outside of a few, were odd challenges/purposes. The other ended up in one of our demo theaters to see what kind of deeply complicated concoctions we could come up with in our automations. Including controlling various special 4D effects that we challenged ourselves to come up with using whatever we had lying around (fans, video lights, etc).
It really is a small, simple remote that is no bigger than a decor switch/controller taken out of its wall plate. Which is exactly what it is. Only with a small rechargeable battery stuffed inside, a USB-C for charging it. A wireless version of the company’s ZEN32 scene controller.
When it came time for us to add this to our setups, we found that it only took us a few minutes to get things going. We paired it using Home Assistant in all scenarios we tested it against, since we have become strong fans of HA over recent years. It’s like SmartThings, but you have far more control over it, and it potentially requires less upgrading over time, depending on what you install it on.
After pairing it to HA via Bluetooth (using Zooz’s own Z-Wave adapter, we made use of a Blueprint to configure it. This made for a quick template approach to setting everything up, configuring each button to do what we needed. We did have to change something in one of the files to compensate for the device name since this is LR (long-range) vs the one that came before it, but we were off and moving in no time.
From there, we started piling on the actions to each key press that we wanted. In the theater here, as I mentioned, we started working on various special effects to simply have fun with. We didn’t know where we were going with it. Just that we wanted to come up with random ideas and then see how we can automate them via remote. At one point, we were going to drag in a fog machine, but were quickly shot down for fear it might trigger an alarm somewhere. Then we started assigning random things for various scenarios, such as lighting conditions.
The end result was similar to the one that traveled to one of the homes. These remotes simply work. Of course, it doesn’t matter what you assign to the buttons since as long as those actions or automations work in your network, they will trigger just fine with the remote. All the processing is being done by your smart home setup, and the remote is just a control interface. So what we focused on was how accurate it was at detecting specific button presses (single, double, triple, long-press, etc).
It is nice to make use of a remote without the question rolling around in your head about how long it will be until you have to swap the battery and how cost-effective that is going to be. I’ve come across some third-party remotes that die incredibly quickly (I mean, within days of a fresh battery). This one not only lasts much longer than that, but it doesn’t matter since you can just plug it in each time.
Our Conclusion
We ended up spending a lot of time with this remote, and it has inspired some new ideas, as well a fed some previous plans that we’ve had for some future walkthroughs on clever ways to automate things. So you’ll be seeing those stories in the near future.
These remotes are incredibly responsive, and we haven’t run into an issue yet when it comes to them losing connection to the rest of the Z-Wave network. They are versatile when it comes to the number of things you can assign to them, and look great when secured to a wall in their magnetic wall plate.
And to make things better, it is a Z-Wave 800LR (long-range) device. Which means it supports the latest Z-Wave LR adapters/hubs, providing great distance when it comes to connectivity, while also fully supporting previous versions of Z-Wave all the same. All-in-all, a fine addition to any smart home setup.
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Specifications:
- Z-Wave Region: US / CA / MX
- Power: 1 x LIR2032 rechargeable battery. Use a small 5V max 1A power supply for charging only. Do not use Apple chargers with any Zooz device, as they can provide up to 20V or more to non-Apple products, which would damage the device.
- Z-Wave Range: Up to 250 feet line of sight (and up to 1300 feet with Z-Wave Long Range)
- Operating Temperature: 32-104 F (0-40 C)
- Installation: Indoor use only
Are you a manufacturer or distributor that would like us to test something out for review? Contact us, and we can let you know where to send the product, and we will try it out.
