Smart Home Bridges & Hubs: The Control Center
Gateways, repeaters and hubs for ZigBee, Z-Wave, Matter and Thread: connect all your smart home devices into one system.
Smart Home Bridges and Hubs: The central hub in your smart home
With a smart home network, you can not only maximize the comfort in your home. Energy costs can also be effectively reduced with an automated system. However, if you want to put together a network of coordinated smart home modules, you may need a smart home bridge or a smart home hub. These devices serve as a central interface and control center if your smart home system uses a wireless standard such as ZigBee, Z-Wave or EnOcean. If you use a corresponding network, you should make sure which wireless standards the product is suitable for before buying your smart home hub. Some hubs even support multiple wireless protocols.
The use of a smart control panel has several advantages. On the one hand, you can arrange for the individual smart home modules to communicate with each other. For example, you can set a smart radiator thermostat to activate automatically as soon as a connected smart thermometer registers that the temperature has dropped below a certain level. The corresponding configuration usually takes place via the manufacturer's own smartphone app. Various hubs are also able to establish a connection between different smart home devices, even if they come from different companies.
By the way: Smart homes that work with a WLAN connection also function without a bridge or hub. However, the energy consumption of these systems is higher than those that work with ZigBee or other wireless protocols.
