Reviewed by HAI Staff

Mi Casa Verde Vera

Low-cost Vera System Lets You Automate Z-Wave Lighting Controls and More!

Overall Rating: 8.3 out of 10

Product Features

The Z-Wave-compatible Vera product from Mi Casa Verde is a compact unit about the size of a wireless access point; it comes with a Z-Wave USB dongle and built-in software. The Vera hub, which acts as the central “server” to the system, controls a Z-Wave mesh network of devices installed in your home. These can range from lighting devices like the Leviton Vizia RF+ family, a Wayne-Dalton Z-Wave thermostat, wireless IP cameras, a Z-Wave motion sensor, and a Schlage Z-Wave door lock. Add all these devices together and you have a very complete home automation system.

Vera functions like a wireless router, a wired (4-port) router or switch and a Web server for all of the automation functions. Setting up Vera as the Primary Controller of your Z-Wave devices is straightforward. Vera arrives fully configured to send emails or SMS alerts for any action or alert that happens in the home; which is as simple as typing in your address and checking off a box to receive a message for that event.

You can program everything from simple light commands to very complicated lighting scenes into Vera, or similarly setup a schedule to control your thermostat settings.

Rating: 8.0 out of 10

Product Installation

The Vera setup is excruciatingly simple: AlI you have to do is plug the Vera into your existing home data network and plug it into a wall power outlet. The Vera does the rest.

It will automatically configure itself to your home data network. If it discovers it is plugged into a router, it shuts off its own router functions, and enables its Wi-Fi to allow both wired and wireless access to the Ethernet network. You may expect additional steps, but that's it!

To access the built-in Vera web page from any computer in the house you enter http://findvera.com in your browser and the setup page appears. No configuring IP addresses, no configuring the router, and no firewall settings to change. Then in the corner of the setup page a YouTube video pops up and starts walking you through the process.

This pleasant guide helps you with all of your settings, from establishing the Z-Wave network to adding scenes and automation tasks. You could not ask for an easier or more straight-forward way of doing what could have been a very complicated process.

After following all of the video instructions, copying the information from your existing Z-wave network, and adding all of your rooms and existing devices you will have finished all of the “heavy lifting” in a much shorter time frame than expected.

If you've installed any type of electronic equipment in the past, you will be pleasantly surprised by the ease of the basic Vera installation.

If you do add a Schlage Z-Wave door lock, the Z-wave network has to support “secure” devices and it has to be able to do so while maintaining the integrity of the other Z-wave devices to be able to control the Schlage door lock. The instructions to set up the lock and Vera at first seemed a little complicated, but if you follow them to the letter, you will find the process very manageable and easy to accomplish.

Rating: 10.0 out of 10

Product Reliability

Mi Casa Verde, established in 2008, has innovated a smart home controller that is easy to setup and use for many homeowners. The product is an enhanced Ethernet wired/wireless router and baseband station using an imbedded Linux OS. This is not ground breaking technology, so we would expect solid reliability from the Vera controller. While the product is not perfect, we would also expect improvements to be delivered in a Vera2 model in the near term.

Support is available from the company web site and features a "self help" approach which includes: a user Forum, a complete Bug reporting list, Wiki Documentation, and a complete Supported Hardware list as submitted by other users.

You can submit questions via an online form, but there is no mention of the response time to expect. Our guess would be they'll try to answer you within 24-48 hours. So, while the installation & setup of Vera is straightforward, if you do experience a showstopper issue it may take longer than you would like to dig out a resolution or hear back from Support.

Rating: 7.0 out of 10

Note: Much of the above content was extracted from a 2009 article wriiten for Electronic House by Avi Rosenthal (www.eguestcontrols.com)