Right now, there really isn't. This is why pairing in place is so important as well as having up to date Z-wave plus repeaters and remove legacy Z-wave repeating devices if you want to use newer Z-Wave.
The 4 hop limit is something a repair and the Z-Wave framework is supposed to just work out. But it assumes you have enough repeating devices (powered by AC) that support Z-Wave plus. One older or bad / rogue repeating Z-Wave device in the middle of a mesh can wreck havoc.
So can flooding the network with repeated pairing / join requests, exclusion requests, repeated repair requests, etc. Patience and time are the two things also required besides enough repeaters.
There are 3rd party tools that can help diagnose a Z-Wave mesh and map it out. It is not something we have built into the hub at this time.
@SmartHomePrimer I'm not sure I understand your statement about ZigBee and "self-healing". This community is full of "someone turned off a light and my Zigbee devices fell off the network" kinds of reports. I realize this is somewhat of a religious argument as to which is a better choice Zigbee or Zwave but I have had a super reliable Zwave network. I recently paired a Zwave non-plus contact sensor sitting in my livingroom and walked it outside and attached it to a gate that is about as far from the hub as I can get. The sensor responded immediately in spite of the fact that it could not possibly connect directly to the hub.
When I first started looking at automation beyond X10 this same religious argument was going on with Zigbee or Zwave. Problem was, there wasn't much available in Zigbee and there still isn't.
I don't have a lot of experience with Zigbee devices. I have Hue lights attached to a Hue hub and quite recently, a handful of Zigbee sensors just so I could get some experience with Zigbee on the HE hub. I do have almost as many repeaters as I do sensors. It has been reliable but I can't say I would have wanted to start with Zigbee with so few choices in so few categories.
I have an Aeon Zstick paired to my HE hub and attached to a Linux computer. I have Open Zwave Control Panel running on the Linux machine. OZWCP logs all the Zwave messaging and I can collect hop and neighbor tables.
Yes power is important. Doesn't matter your protocol. No offense, but it's almost like clockwork. Give an opinion and express how you personally feel about one protocol, and there's someone there to tell you how their choice is better.
I'm pleased that you have a stable network and I'm not here to sway anyone one way or another. I prefer Zigbee. You prefer Z-Wave. To each their own. However, I'm continually confused by the statements that there is so much more available for Z-Wave then Zigbee. There are certainly a lot of crap products out there that run on Z-Wave, but for the most part they seem to be duplicates of what is already available from another manufacturer that makes a better version. Can't say there's anything aside from my Aeon HEM that I haven't been able to get in Zigbee if I wanted.
Not sure if this is the answer, but I believe that while a zigbee mesh can self-heal, it doesn’t do so instantaneously. It can take 24 hours (or more?) depending on the size/complexity of the mesh. Most people don’t wait that long before they post about their woes here (myself included, I’m sure) .
I have those notorious Hampton Bay Zigbee Fan controllers and I have 'wall wart' style outlets plugged into dull dumb in-wall outlets. I'd love to replace them with ones my family can't 'remove to make it look nicer.'
I see 2 Zigbee in-wall switches (GE & Honeywell, so likely just one product from Jasco), but I already have ZWave switches occupying 100% of the switch locations in those rooms.
LOL. I almost wrote that I wasn't talking about in-wall products. You're not wrong that there are not a lot of Zigbee in-wall products, but that's never bothered me. I'm un-apologetically an Insteon fan when it comes to In-Wall products. The dual mesh just cannot be beat in it's stability and the product hardware features are professional level at a hobbyists price. Caséta in-wall products are not bad, but if I was going to go full in on that protocol and had the funds for it (the most critical element) then it would be RA2, not Caséta.
However, I'm quite happy with my Insteon In-wall products, which in all honesty I was just about to abandon when I became enamored with the Hubitat hub, but @cwwilson08 great guy that he is, saved my investment. Not only did he save it, but I get to wonder what it's like to have issues with Zigbee and Z-Wave in-wall outlets. Fortunately, it’s just nothing I ever experience with Insteon. Never drops, always works and it's not WiFi. I can't ask for much more.
Actually I didn't. I think in some ways I got lucky, because I took no effort to build my network from The hub outward. I just put in devices as I saw fit, and ran a zwave repair after I added each bunch.
Of course that's how I did it in my last house too, I never had any zwave mesh problems there either. But again I had 50 + devices in that install too... So lots and lots of devices to route through.
I think if you have enough devices sprinkled around mesh issues are largely nonexistent.
if you have few devices, and a weak mesh, I think the order you build things and the number of devices matters greatly though.
+1 that .....I remember back in brand new into this area days with smartthings....the first thing I bought were 10 contact sensors (battery powered) Schlage locks (battery powered) and constantly wondered why they rarely worked....after beefing up the mesh, zero issues.
As per my hunt for a new mailbox sensor zwave is my ONLY options because zigbee doesn't have the range I need. ( I can't add a repeater to the neighbors house between me and the mailbox)
I too deployed many of my ZWave devices haphazardly back in 2013-2014, when I certainly didn't plan on having nearly 80 ZWave devices. (51 on one hub, 28 on the other, today.) I never planned out the mesh because it was clear it wouldn't behave the way I intended. 5 years later and a few hundred ZWave repairs and the most recent device to "fall off" is so far back, I'm inclined to say "Never."
When I split my house into two ZWave Hubs (upstairs / downstairs) I was expecting trouble because "surely one device is key to downstairs that I'll be Excluding..." -- never happened.
I know my Zigbee mesh is weak because A) it's 2.4ghz and I had to install a Peanut to get a Motion sensor to work because it doesn't travel as far; and B) I have 'wall warts' as repeaters and I just know it's gonna get 'cleaned up' any day now. (or month, or year)
I was going to use this but I managed to get a d/w sensor and a repeater to work. But you said you can't have a repeater so I thought I would throw this out there. Two wires from the transmitter go to a contact switch with magnet.
Output of receiver can be tied to the aux. input of a d/w sensor inside the house so HE can pick it up.
Appreciate it.....Ya with zigbee I can't have a repeater (on the neighbors house), which I would need. I've had a zwave contact sensor on the mailbox working fine for over a year (until last week), I guess "indoor use only" does actually apply long term, as after a year it's toast from rain...lol
I tried using a securifi peanut plug to repeat on an outside plug of my house, and used one of my Iris v1 contact sensors to see if they could replace the fibaro zwave I had, only made it half way to the mailbox before it no longer responded. (mailbox is about 150 feet with a neighbor house partially blocking it)
But yes I imagine the above you linked to would work great as well being 315MHz.....
I had similar issues yesterday pairing the Z-wave repeaters in my Iris plugs. They would get stuck on initializing and do nothing from there. I would then go in and start Z-wave inclusion again and they would finally finish.
On a side note... what is the general consensus on how good of a repeater these Iris (Centralite) plugs are? I purchased some of the Zooz power strips that were on sale, and it worked well closer to the hub, but was extremely slow to respond, if at all, further from the hub. I have GE ZW+ wall switches all around, but when I took it to it's final resting place, it was very erratic. The hub running z-wave is on the second floor, in the middle of the house. I paired it on the first floor all the way at one end and it worked great, fast. once I moved to the basement with it, even with 4 Iris repeater outlets in varying distances from it to the hub, it became unreliable. I then turned on the z-wave radio on the hub I use on the first floor, basically directly above the strip that is in the basement, and paired the strip to this hub. It is now fairly reliable. Are the Iris repeating plugs not good at handling all of the reporting from these strips, or are they just out-dated repeaters?
Find me a ZigBee switch dimmer module and I'm there! I also prefer ZigBee but just can't seem to find many powered anything. No powered PIRs either!
O yeah I'm in the UK aswell so less chance.
So this is a good sign of not enough repeaters. Can try a repair, but what happens during inclusion is devices go into high power mode, radio signal strength is highest (also why batteries die fast when pairing)... Anyway, when it pairs, it falls back to lower power mode... And if the nearest neighbor isn't strong enough for a signal, poor performance.
Good, modern repeating devices are the critical backbone to any Z-Wave mesh network (and Zigbee too).
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