GE Enbrighten Z-Wave Plus Smart Motion Sensor Light Switch, On/Off, Vacancy / Occupancy Sensor, Includes White and Lt. Almond, Zwave Hub Required, Works with SmartThings, Wink, and Alexa, 26931

I love this switch!
Yes, I am aware of how silly it is to get excited about something like a light switch, but here we are. I’m excited, and I’m going to tell you all about it.When I started my home automation journey a few years ago, I decided to go with Samsung SmartThings, but I got tired of how hiccups on Samsung’s servers could make things in my house not work.But I had a house full of Samsung and GE hardware, and I wanted a solution that could use it, so I moved to Home Assistant. I deployed HA as a VM on an ESXi host in my basement (don’t judge me) with a USB zwave/zigbee dongle (linked below) passed through. Home Assistant is amazing, but this is not an HA review, so we’ll move on.Initially, I had a bunch of Samsung motion sensors programmed in automations to control GE zwave in-wall toggle switches, much like this one. But those switches were just toggles, and did not include a motion sensor. This switch does. It includes a motion sensor. It includes a mains-powered motion sensor.Now, I read a lot of reviews here on Amazon before I bought this switch, and several did mention that the switch doesn’t work like you think it should – that it doesn’t register as two different devices when you pair it with your zwave controller, or how it doesn’t clear motion when motion is clear, or, whatever. I assume that those reviews are absolutely correct for those people, but most of the writers of those reviews identified the systems they were using, and I’m not using any of those, so I bought the switch and figured I could make it work somehow, even if it didn’t work the way I wanted.It turns out that I needn’t worry; it works perfectly. It works beautifully. Home Assistant sees it as a single device with both on/off and motion entities, and can interact with those entities independently of one another, triggering actions that are unrelated if you so choose.The reason this is so exciting is that most zwave/zigbee motion sensors are battery-powered, so you have to replace the batteries from time to time – and in areas with a lot of traffic (like my kitchen) those batteries need to be replaced every 6 months or so. It’s exhausting. It’s wasteful. It’s dumb.This switch resolves that. You don’t need a switch AND a motion sensor. This switch provides both independently of one another. I could program HA to use the motion sensor in this switch to turn on the lights in the living room if I wanted to. That would be weird, but I’m saying this as an example. The motion sensor triggers and clears regardless of what the state of the switch is – at least in Home Assistant.I’ve included a photo of the switch installed at the top of my basement stairs because I’m waffling on where to move the current zwave switch in my kitchen to. For my basement, I used to have an open/close sensor on the door that would trigger the lights because my spouse and I often have our hands full when going into the basement and it’s easier to have the lights come on automatically.Out of the box, this switch supports this functionality without a zwave controller, but I wanted my controller to control on/off because I’m often in the basement longer than any of the hardware settings on the switch. So I set the switch to manual (do nothing) and programmed Home Assistant to turn the light on when motion was detected, and to turn it off after 90 minutes via a timer helper. It works exactly how I’ve programmed it in HA. It really is exciting, because now I’m going to need more of these switches so that I can ditch my battery-powered motion sensors.Also, the printed instructions that come with the switch are pretty clear on how to change modes/sensitivity/etc. And it supports multiple add-on switches (3-way, 4-way, etc.) which will come in handy when I replace the switches in my upstairs/downstairs hallways with these.I literally have nothing bad to say about this switch.For tech-minded people:I’m using Home Assistant OS 6.1 with supervisor-2021.06.8 and core-2021.7.4HA is deployed as a VM via ova on ESXi 7.0.0Although I assume you could install HA on a pi or vbox host or whatever and still have the same experience.And it’s using this zwave/zigbee dongle: ​https://smile.amazon.com/dp/B01GJ826F8/ref=cm_sw_em_r_mt_dp_T52NBE63V5YZTJR7W5NN?_encoding=UTF8&psc=1

Switch works fine but an issue with motion interference may be just my installation/situation:I have this switch controlling bathroom light in same gang box with another ZWave switch that controls the bathroom ceiling fan. I have a program that turns fan on periodically every hour for 5 minutes but what I notice is that the bathroom light would also come on around 50% of the time the program ran. After experimenting a bit I determine it is an over-sensitive motion sensor that gets triggered whenever I turn the fan on or off… I confirm this because I temporarily disabled motion sensor during testing turning fan on/off and light never comes on. So what my programs do now is temporarily disable the motion sensor, turn fan on, enable, wait how long I want fan on, then disable again and turn fan off, enable again… with about 4 sec in between parameter writes. I also tried setting motion sensitivity to lowest which did not resolve the issue.I currently am using it using central scene control and disabled the built-in default light turns on for 5 minutes when detecting motion to manual mode, and set the reset cycle to 10 seconds. My programs handle all the motion events eg. turns bathroom light and fan on based on motion sensor.Note that there is no scene control nodes for pressing the paddle switches, so cannot trigger other switches using this method in ISY scenes or programs (a program could just use the light on status instead though). However, the ergonomics of this switch is very bad and I would not really like to use as a scene controller, let along actually using the switch itself, just keep it turning on/off via motion.Please don’t follow prominent YouTubers who install 100 of these in their house for some strange reason.. there is no need to have 4 or 5 motion sensors in one gang box either. There are far better products out there than GE/Jasco for ZWave toggle switches (that start and end with “Z”) and you should be getting 700 series nowadays instead of 500 series like this. The ONLY reason to buy this switch is because there is currently no alternative for an in-wall ZWave motion sensor switch if that is what you want/need. If I would do it over again, I would just use better brand switches and separate motion sensor.

Great product and very useful for home automation, if you want the motion sensor to trigger at specific times or trigger other lights, The only drawback is you can not change the light sensitivity in which the sensor activates. Most Lutron motion detection switches that are not ‘smart’ allow you to edit the light sensitivity setting by shutting the light off within 5 second of it turning on (if its too bright) I wish this switch had the same sort of learning mode for light sensitivity. I will try incorporating it with a sepreate light sensor on the same network.