Fibaro HC Lite

The Fibaro Home Center Lite is the compact controller: a 90mm square that plugs into your router and runs a Z-Wave house from a shelf.

• The Fibaro Home Center Lite runs a whole Z-Wave house
• Scenes built by dragging blocks
• The app for using it, the browser for building it
• The one thing to know against the Home Center 2
• What it does not need

The Fibaro Home Center Lite runs a whole Z-Wave house

The Fibaro Home Center Lite handles up to 230 Z-Wave devices, which is far more than most houses will ever fit, out of a square the size of a coaster.

Sensors, dimmers, relays, blinds, locks and thermostats all report to it and can act on each other, rather than each sitting alone in its own app waiting to be opened. It draws very little power and is designed to go on a shelf and be forgotten.

Scenes built by dragging blocks

Fibaro's interface is the reason people buy the brand. An evening routine that dims the lounge, closes the blinds and arms the sensors takes a few minutes to assemble and involves writing nothing at all.

Geolocation lets the house react to people arriving and leaving, so the routine can fire on the gate opening rather than on a clock.

The app for using it, the browser for building it

Daily use lives in the Fibaro app on iPhone and Android: turning things on, checking a sensor, running a scene.

The real configuration happens in the browser interface on the local network, which is far more capable than the app and is where anyone setting the system up will spend their time.

The one thing to know against the Home Center 2

LUA scripting is not on this model. It is a Home Center 2 feature, and it is the single functional difference that matters between the two.

If block-based scenes cover what you want to build, the Lite does the same job in a much smaller box. If you want to write conditions, loops and virtual devices yourself, you need the larger controller and there is no way around it.

What it does not need

Everything runs on the box itself rather than in somebody's cloud, so automations keep working through an internet outage and nothing is waiting on a server to respond. There is no subscription attached to any of it.

It has a single 10/100 ethernet port and no USB or VGA, which is the trade for the size. If you need LUA, the ports or the processing headroom, that is the Home Center 2. If the house is not purely Z-Wave, a multi-protocol hub such as the Homey covers more radios. Fibaro publish their range at fibaro.com.