Aeotec Heavy Duty Switch

A heavy duty smart switch is what you reach for when the thing you want to switch is too big for an ordinary one. A borehole pump, a three-phase-fed water heater, a large geyser, a workshop compressor: loads where a normal glass touch panel would be well outside its rating. The Aeotec Heavy Duty Switch is rated to 40 amps, which is 9,600 watts at 240 volts, and it is built as a hard-wired module with heavy screw terminals rather than a wall plate.

• Loads a heavy duty smart switch is for
• It measures as well as switches
• It needs a Z-Wave hub, on the right band
• Two things to plan around
• Check your hub band first

It also measures. As well as switching the load it reports real-time power in watts and cumulative energy in kilowatt hours back to your controller, so you can see what the pump or the geyser is actually costing you rather than guessing. On a property where the water heater is the biggest single line on the bill, that is usually the more interesting half of the product.

It is a Z-Wave device, so it needs a Z-Wave hub. It has no Wi-Fi and no app of its own. Ours is the EU variant, ZW078-C, which runs on 868.42 MHz, and your hub has to be on the same band. A hub bought in the United States runs on 908.42 MHz and will never see it.

Two more things worth saying plainly. It is rated IP44 but Aeotec's own documentation specifies indoor use only, so an outdoor pump housing needs its own weatherproof enclosure around it. And it is not a plug-in device: it terminates heavy cable on screw terminals and belongs to an electrician, not a weekend.

Loads a heavy duty smart switch is for

A borehole pump, a large geyser, a workshop compressor: loads where a glass touch panel would be well outside its rating. A heavy duty smart switch of this kind is built as a hard-wired module with heavy screw terminals rather than a wall plate, rated to 40 A resistive, which is 9,600 W at 240 V, and up to 5 HP of motor load.

Peak current endurance is 1,440 A for 10 ms, which is the figure that matters when a pump motor starts.

It measures as well as switches

As well as switching the load it reports real-time power in watts and cumulative energy in kilowatt hours back to your controller. On a property where the water heater or the borehole pump is the biggest single line on the bill, that is usually the more interesting half of the product: you stop guessing what a circuit costs and start reading it.

It needs a Z-Wave hub, on the right band

It is a Z-Wave Plus device. It has no Wi-Fi and no app of its own, so a Z-Wave controller is required.

Ours is the EU variant, ZW078-C, running on 868.42 MHz, and your hub has to be on the same band. A hub bought in the United States runs on 908.42 MHz and will never see it. That is not a setting, it is a different radio, so check the hub before you order.

Two things to plan around

It is rated IP44, but Aeotec own documentation specifies indoor use only. An outdoor pump housing therefore needs its own weatherproof enclosure built around it rather than relying on the module rating.

And it is not a plug-in device. It terminates heavy cable on screw terminals, draws 1 W on standby, weighs 428 g and works from 5 to 40 degrees C. This belongs to an electrician rather than to a weekend.

Check your hub band first

The one thing that will waste your money here is a controller on the wrong frequency. Ours is the EU unit on 868.42 MHz. A hub carried back from the United States runs on 908.42 and the two will never meet. Tell us what you are running and we will confirm the pair before anything ships.

Beyond that it is an electrician job, and on an outdoor pump it needs its own weatherproof box around it. Aeotec keep the manual at aeotec.com. See also AC and heaters.