Home Assistant is a testament to the power of open source and interoperability, combining the abilities of devices in ways that would never be possible normally, while often enabling its users to control the smart devices they own over their network, and without a proprietary app. Nabu Casa, a commercial partner of the Open Home Foundation, was founded by the creators of Home Assistant and provides paid-for services such as Home Assistant Cloud. Nabu Casa makes its own hardware, too, and has released the Connect ZBT-1 (a Zigbee dongle), the Home Assistant Green, and the Home Assistant Voice Preview Edition. Now it's released the Connect ZWA-2, a Z-Wave antenna.

The Connect ZWA-2 is a fantastic device for a few reasons, and for those who want to get started with Z-Wave in their smart homes, a must-have. It has an incredible range, with an extreme test of a prototype at last year's Z-Wave Alliance member meeting showing that it was capable of consistent transmission with line of sight from 0.7 miles away. It works with Z-Wave Long Range, looks great, and is plug-and-play. With an MSRP of $69, it's admittedly more expensive than other Z-Wave dongles, but I'd argue it justifies its higher price.

The Open Home Foundation has been declaring "Z-Wave is not dead" for over a year in the face of Matter, Wi-Fi, and Zigbee, and honestly? They might just be right.

About this article: Nabu Casa sent us the Home Assistant Connect ZWA-2 for the purposes of this article. The company had no input into its contents.

The Connect ZWA-2 is pretty big

And resembles a candle, apparently

The Home Assistant Connect ZWA-2 looks quite nice, but there is a downside, and that's the size. It takes up a lot of space, and as someone who has a tiny Zigbee dongle in the back of the mini PC that I use to host Home Assistant, I felt pretty lucky that I had the space available to put the ZWA-2, given that I was pretty focused on my setup being able to stay out of sight, out of mind.

With that said, at least that size serves a purpose: better range and reliability. I had no connectivity issues with the two Zooz devices provided for testing: the Zen37 wall remote and the ZSE42 Water Leak XS sensor. The leak sensor maintained a stable connection, and the wall remote worked from anywhere in my apartment, which is a major plus. I even tested the wall remote out in my apartment complex's courtyard, roughly 25 meters away, and I could still control my lights, though I had a low success rate per button press.

Nabu Casa clearly follows a consistent design language, and I'm a big fan of it. Like the Home Assistant Voice Preview Edition, the ZWA-2 uses rounded polycarbonate with a frosted, semi-transparent casing at the base, and the USB-C port is hidden under the base's lip. Its design is so consistent with the HAVPE that if you swapped the screw base for the HAVPE's ring LED and button, you'd have a hard time telling them apart.

To be clear, that consistency is not a bad thing. There's an identity being established here, and it looks a lot different from the regular, "safe" designs of more established players in the smart home space. I'm thinking along the lines of Google and Amazon here. Where those companies are more conservative in their design choices, Nabu Casa's play to differentiate itself achieves wonders.

The ZWA-2 has a single status LED on top: slow blinking orange means the device thinks it's not upright (it should be mounted on a ceiling pointing down or on a regular surface facing up, and the blinking light is a tilt indicator), and solid blue means it's on and working. Nabu Casa says the device resembles a candle; I wouldn't go that far, but I really do like how it looks.

If I had one complaint brought about by the design and its size, it would be that I wish there were a way to wirelessly connect it to my Home Assistant instance without needing to directly plug it into the system itself. While it works where I have it, there are other places in my apartment I would move it to if I could.

Setting up the Home Assistant Connect ZWA-2

I had my first device connected in five minutes

In the box, you get the following:

• ZWA-2 base
• ZWA-2 antenna
• Braided USB-C connection cable

It's very simple, and you just screw the antenna into the base and connect the USB-C cable to it. Then, plug the USB-A into a spare port on the hardware hosting your Home Assistant instance. If you've ever connected a dongle to your Home Assistant instance before, such as a Zigbee dongle, the process is the exact same.

In my case, I had to do a USB passthrough in Proxmox and then reboot the Home Assistant OS virtual machine so that it would pick up the cable. Doing it in Proxmox was easy; I went to the Hardware tab of my VM, added a USB device, and Proxmox detected the ZWA-2 and allowed me to select it.

The passthrough will differ depending on what way you run Home Assistant. If you have the Home Assistant Green, for example, then plug it in and... that's it. For TrueNAS, you would find the USB device in /dev/serial/by-id/ and pass through that device. The process will differ depending on your Home Assistant deployment, but it should be easy no matter what.

Once I booted up my VM and Home Assistant started, the integrations tab prompted me to add the Z-Wave integration and create my network. You can use the ZWA-2 outside of Home Assistant, though it is currently a work in progress and uses the Z-Wave JS control panel.

Adding devices is simple, and you can add one using automatic discovery or a QR code. I had ZWA-2 added, configured, and my first device connected within five minutes of getting started. It was astonishingly easy, and while I know that the ease of deployment isn't unique to the ZWA-2, it's nice that it's not any more difficult than alternatives, either.

Should you buy the Home Assistant Connect ZWA-2?

It might save you money in the long run

If you're looking to get started with Z-Wave in a large home, the ZWA-2 is a no-brainer. It's not a dongle with limited transmitting power; it's a tower with extended range. In my apartment block, I was able to successfully control my lights using the wall remote through multiple concrete walls (though that wasn't too far, approximately 15 meters away), and while flaky, I could successfully control my lights from about 25 meters away in the courtyard, which accounts for a pretty big elevation difference (I'm a few stories up), a concrete wall, and multiple plaster walls in between.

In fact, I'd argue that the limitation here was the wall remote rather than the ZWA-2 itself. With a line of sight, Zooz says that it supports a distance of up to 1300 feet, and up to 250 feet over regular Z-Wave. Obviously, neither instance was line of sight, but it's a good metric for comparison. Given that we've already established the ZWA-2 has a much longer line of sight signal reception (0.7 miles, as per last year's testing), it would stand to reason that the limitation comes from the wall remote. That makes sense, obviously; it's a lot smaller, so it's not that Zooz could have done much better, really, it's just that physics is a hard problem to solve.

If coverage distance is something you worry about, then the ZWA-2 is a game-changer. If you live in a big home, slap it down in a central area of your home, and then get a repeater or two for the furthest parts. While the ZWA-2 costs approximately double the Zooz ZST39 USB dongle for Z-Wave, you'll save money on repeaters by having greater coverage overall.