Hope to find someone that can tell how it works...
A solar inverter I just installed has this ZigBee feature. I guess it allows monitoring and controlling it being at the basement from my phone somewhere in the house.
I use an Android phone. I do not have WiFi at home and I do not want to have it. Also have a laptop that contains WiFi stuff but disabled as I use direct ethernet connection only.
Is the communication direct from the phone to the Zigbee at the inverter unit; or I need a WiFi network ?

If posted at a wrong place, please move properly.

 

Hope to find someone that can tell how it works...
A solar inverter I just installed has this ZigBee feature. I guess it allows monitoring and controlling it being at the basement from my phone somewhere in the house.
I use an Android phone. I do not have WiFi at home and I do not want to have it. Also have a laptop that contains WiFi stuff but disabled as I use direct ethernet connection only.
Is the communication direct from the phone to the Zigbee at the inverter unit; or I need a WiFi network ?

If posted at a wrong place, please move properly.

Zigbee (IEEEE 802.15) is a completely different protocol from WiFi (IEEE 802.11). It is a mesh networking system that operates in the 902-928Mhz band in the US and others in Europe and elsewhere.

It's used extensively for smart home devices, and your device might even be ZWave compatible which is a very broadly supported proprietary standard on top of Zigbee.

Your device is probably designed to work with a smart home hun (e.g.: Samsung SmartThings among many others) but it will not work directly with a mobile device which lacks the radio hardware to do it. The hub talks to devices on 900Mhz and to the LAN/Internet on 2.4 or 5.6GHz using WiFi.