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• RadioRA2 Quick Review
• sen
• 2021-08-04

Summary

I decided to switch away from Z-Wave as I was having in-wall devices fail about once a year and was tired of it, as well as the mesh nature of the system caused problems regularly. Devices would end up relaying commands through other devices that were battery powered or almost out of range, resulting in slow responses as they timed out and had to retry. I was able to fix things up every time, but I got sick of the amount of maintenance it needed on an ongoing basis.

In addition since it was initially a closed protocol requiring a business relationship and NDA to get access to, there are a lot of undocumented bits that I wasn't able to make work well, and interop issues between different brands are common. As one example, I used Leviton keypads but the dim/brighten buttons only work if you use the right brand of Leviton dimmers and a Leviton remote control to set it all up, so I just wasn't able to use those keypad buttons. Leviton also stopped doing custom engraving right after I bought the keypads, so I was stuck with stickers.

I evaluated a few options:

• Insteon - People report similar reliability issues as with Z-Wave, so didn't see enough advantage to go this route.
• Wi-Fi options - These seem fine for one or two switches, but doing a whole house with them starts to get problematic from what I saw. There also isn't one ecosystem so interop issues might still exist, and the reliability varies.
• Lutron Caseta - Everyone loves this system, it's very reliable and seems to work great. I don't like the switch design though, and there's only battery-powered keypad options which wasn't ideal.
• Lutron RadioRA2 - Ended up going this route because it's just as reliable as the other Lutron systems, has more-normal looking switches, and has several options for keypads.

I'm doing a slow migration, replacing one device at a time as I find good deals on eBay or otherwise come across hardware rather than trying to replace everything at once (which would be cost-prohibitive). The integration protocol works well with openHAB, so everything still acts as one integrated system even though it's currently split across two protocols.

Pros

• It's incredibly reliable. I've never had a command not work or take longer than milliseconds.
• Super fast, essentially no delay between button push and action. Actions that turn a light on across the house respond faster than some of my Z-Wave switches could control their local loads.
• Everything is synchronized. If you have a scene that shuts off 3 lights over a 5 second dimming period, they all dim in sync with one another. It sounds like a minor thing but feels very "fancy" when it happens.
• Open integration protocol with full docs available, and it's very complete.
• Reasonably nice looking keypads for tabletop or in-wall use, tabletop keypads can either be battery or wall adapter powered.
• Keypads are backlit, have a variety of button arrangements, indicator LEDs, and come with a certificate for custom button engraving. All keypads have a full button set behind them, so you can change the arrangement of buttons by snapping a new button kit on the front.
• Keypads are available with an optional dimmer built in so you can replace a switch with one and not need an extra gang on the box for a separate dimmer and keypad.
• Great documentation that lists everything every device does and how to do it, and free 24/7 support that is terrific.
• All wall box devices available in a huge range of colour options, and wall plates comes in options like metal and glass as well as lots of plastic colour options.
• The logic that's included works well and reliably. Things like "turn this light on half an hour before sunset, then slowly dim it to 50% over a one hour period and close the shades at the end" are easy to set up.
• Software lets you customize everything from dimming phase to backlight brightness to default dim/brighten times, and tons more.
• When you program the system, everything gets pushed into each individual device. This means that if the main repeater (hub of the system) is down, everything still works other than any Ethernet/RS232 integrations that rely on the repeater. It also contributes to the speed since a lot of things can go point-to-point between devices.

Cons

• It's expensive. I'm building my system from ebay'ed parts and it's about twice what I'd pay for new Z-Wave gear.
• Switches/dimmers only have one button under the paddle which is weird. It's mostly fine in practice because if the light is on and you press it you must want it off and vice-versa, but it's strange especially for out-of-view lights. They're well designed at least, so you can press anywhere on the paddle and it activates.
• It's officially only available via dealers, but they quietly made it friendly to sufficiently motivated DIYers a year or so ago. L1 certification allows most stuff and is a free self-paced couple hour online course, L2 allows a few more esoteric pieces of hardware (contact closure, 0-10V, etc.) and takes it from 100 max devices to 200, and requires an online instructor-led 3 day course (which they send you a bunch of hardware for that you need to start a system anyways, so I did this).
• No fancy custom logic possible, you need to connect it to C4, Crestron, openHAB, etc. to get anything fancier than "button does this", timeclock based actions, and some occupancy/vacancy things. I only have one situation where it has to round-trip to openHAB though, and the integration protocol is so fast at reporting and responding that it's fine.

Outcome

I'm extremely happy with the new system, it's solved all the things I was frustrated with and gave me a bunch of extra functionality. The little things like scene-specific dimming and brightening times actually make a big difference to how nice the system feels as well, even though I didn't even consider them when I was weighing the different options.

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