Zooz Z-Wave Long Range Power Strip ZEN20 800LR with Energy Monitoring and 2 USB Ports | Works with Z-Box, Hubitat, Home Assistant, Compatible with SmartThings

Good For “Mission Critical” Indoor Power Monitoring Applications
I live in the subarctic. My home water situation is “different” from most places on earth. I have a water tank buried in the ground and a pump that draws water to supply my home. As you might imagine, that pump is absolutely mission critical to my home’s operation. Put simply, I wasn’t going to trust it with a cheap $10 WiFi plug. The typical draw is approximately 800 watts, with even higher startup peaks.I use Home Assistant for my home automation platform. Using Z-Wave JS, this switch enumerates on/off status with switch control, amp draw, voltage level, watt draw, KwH usage and ping. Most important to me, this unit can be configured to remember “last state” or be “always on” – meaning, it will always return to on state for my application. Also important, this device can be monitored for “alive” and “dead” status, which I can then alert on. In my application, I actually use two methods for this assessment – a UPS battery status over WiFi and this switch – both of which tell me whether the pump has power.Interestingly enough, I wasn’t really interested in turning my pump on and off with this device, almost ever. We’ve burned through a few expensive tanks of water due to leaks and faucets left open, though. I really wanted power draw because it allows some interesting analysis. I can now measure and alert on “abnormal” power usage, which can indicate higher or lesser than normal operations. (Such as “pump running when we aren’t home.”) Though I haven’t actually done this yet in my automation, I can kill power to the home water pump in the event abnormal usage is detected. For now, I’m using alerting & manual switching based on alerting and that’s probably good enough for me.For me, the return on investment will be the prevention of just one of those events. It took me a little bit to figure out how to do the analysis in Home Assistant, but I think I figured it out. Essentially, I’m taking power draw for the previous 15 minute increment, determining if that exceeds a “known normal value” and send an emergency level alert to my phone if that event occurs. Sure, it triggers sometimes when we take a long shower or water the garden, but we know about these things and I want it sensitive enough to detect even a slow leak. I also have a secondary alert that tells me if the pump is active at all while we’re away, which really shouldn’t ever happen.I gave some serious thought about getting into “water monitoring” side as an alternative to my application. When I looked at general cost, managing water is much more expensive than monitoring electricity. It was kind of a “stroke of genius” when I realized that monitoring my pump electrically could get me there just as easily. So, that’s a win for this platform in my opinion.So far, this product got me where I wanted to be, has been reliable and seems to handle a serious electrical load without issue. If anything changes, I’ll be sure to update this review. While it’s on the “more expensive” side of energy monitoring and switching these days, I’m usually willing to pay a bit more for the highly reliable Z-Wave technology and a quality product. I’m thinking about getting a few more to monitor my furnace and a few other important applications, so that’s about as good of a recommendation as I can give.Edit: I’ve used same device in a few more applications now, still love it. I use them on my furnace and fridge, both mission critical applications. (It took some serious trust building to put one on my furnace!) I also use them in my shop. This unit is the only one I’ve found that deals well with large startup (inrush) current. Things like shop-vac’s and my compressor would “pop” other devices I tried, but not this one!

Works well (after some setup work with SmartThings), looks nice
I bought this product to replace a “green” power strip I was previously using for my media center (including a TV, computer, FireTV, and a couple other devices) because it was difficult to decide which device I wanted to be the “master” device (e.g., just because I had the TV on didn’t mean I also needed the FireTV). I eventually bought a second to use with my computer (and the monitor, speaker, and other peripherals) since my laptop began drawing so little power when on *or* off that my “green” power strip had problems deciding when to turn off the controlled outlets based on the master (or perhaps it was getting old, but a replacement was hard to find in any case).Enter the ZooZ ZEN20 power strip: now I can control each of my devices individually. I can leave the computer outlet on the most of the time (I do like to have it on so it can retrieve new TV listings and OS updates, but sleeping when possible) and just turn on power to my TV, Fire TV, or other devices as needed. Similarly, with my computer, I leave the laptop plug on all the time so it stays charged, but I can turn off the monitor, dock, etc. when not needed. I originally used this with SmartThings; at the time, this required a custom device handler, but it appears to be natively supported now, so you should no longer need to. I now use it with Hubitat, where it also works natively (and locally–yay!). When the v2.0 revision of this hardware was introduced, I bought my second, which introduced power monitoring, a flatter more angled plug, some other smaller improvements. Honestly, power monitoring isn’t as great as I thought it would be (I’ve resorted to presence-based automations to turn things off when I leave and “routines”/sets of actions to turn things off when I turn off something that on my dumber strip would have been a “master”) and it’s quite chatty on the Z-Wave network with 5 outlets all doing it, so I toned it down a little for fear of clogging up my network, but it’s there if you want it.The power strip itself works nicely. After some effort getting it to pair (the v1 instruction book was is poorly edited and, among other things, said to “press the power button”to pair–thanks for the reviewer who figured out it was really the CH1 power button and that you may need to press it more than once; this has been fixed in the v2 manual), it’s working well for me. The individual switches respond almost instantly to my commands, and I have it working via Hubitat (and previously ST) with Alexa for voice control (and HomeKit thanks to HomeBridge–though quite unofficial). The device itself also comes with a long cord, and the power strip itself is a nice shiny white. It includes 2 USB charging ports (not Z-wave controllable but could free up outlets if you have USB-powered devices) and five outlets (more than the 4 of the closest competitor, the Aeon strip, which I can’t even find anymore), all of which are individually controllable. My only complaint is that all of the outlets are fairly close together, so if any of your devices have even a power adapter that’s even slightly larger than a typical plug (like an Echo or FireTV), you’ll probably lose the ability to use the outlet next to it. Having one or two of the outlets more widely spaced to avoid this problem would have been great; even with 2.0 revision of this hardware, this was not addressed. Otherwise, no complaints!

I immediately put this out in the chicken run and configured my smart hub to turn it on when the temperature got below freezing so it would keep the water Dishes from icing. You can control each outlet separately. It’s been working perfectly ever since. Temperatures have gone down into the minus double-digits multiple times already, and some days the same in the positives. Makes no difference.I will definitely buy these again when I find other uses. Maybe if I expand my outdoor Christmas lights.

Work perfectly with my Hubitat.com Home Automation server. Report, current (Amp), Volts, Power (Watts). And it can work with my water pump. Wemo Switch where not able to support my water pump when it start but this ZEN 15 is perfect.I have 3 ZEN 15 now and i will buy it again in the futur.