You should write that thing up and do a diagram
Ha. I know enough through hard earned experience to speak on the subject, but don't have enough education to really explain it.
Antenna theory and RF are complicated, and often IMO counterintuitive.
But. I have access to a lot of very smart RF guys, who beat me regularly with large heavy sticks of knowledge in hopes that someday I might know "enough" to be allowed to sit at the adult table.
2 Likes
Still that was a good explanation and a write up should be done. Would save answering a lot of questions. (Maybe look at how the hue and the lutron antennas broadcast as well). In my head I always envision a bubble. But both you and @lewis.heidrick tend to explain things better... Though been a while since I've seen Lewis post...
1 Like
I think we're somewhat in violent agreement...at least theoretically it seems a higher dbi antenna's flatter/wider "donut" beam pattern would be more suited to the layout of a single story ranch space (wider and flatter), while a lower dbi antenna beam (more spherical shape) may be more appropriate in a multi-story space (thinner and taller) where you want more coverage up and down than outward. Or am I (again?) oversimplifying/misunderstanding. 
I do get that increasing gain can cause issues of interference. In my case I went to 7dbi and it's been Z-Wave bliss ever since. So in some realities (at least in my reality) the antenna change/dbi increase has had excellent results and has not had any attendant interference issues. 
It can be simpler to try another antenna than to find a different/better spot for the hub due to wanting an ethernet connection.
Caveat emptor...I have never been nor played an antenna engineer on TV. 
2 Likes
This is a great visualization. Nope I think you have it spot on! There's always a universal truth in antennas, you can have more gain, or more beamwidth, you just can't have both! Its always a compromise!
+100 for violent agreement! 
S.
2 Likes
3 Likes
Unfortunately, I.knoq that it's not an antenna problem in my case as it was working pretty awesome on the z-wave end for months before everything decided to implode one day.
It's been 10 days now and everything z-wave responds...eventually. My garage door triggers so slowly sometimes that my wife gives up and walks around to the door at the back to open it manually. The goodnight routine now takes up to 2 minutes to turn off all the lights and often misses some and has to manually be triggered a second time, which seems pretty instantaneous then. Which seems to me like it's almost like the C8 is getting bogged down, but there are no clear indicators of that to me when I snoop the logs and app usage stats.
Needless to say, the WAF is pretty low right now.
I tried to repair the garage door for my wife's van side tonight, and now it shows as not responding and nothing on the z-wave side works at all again. That was 3 hours ago and I'm turning everything off manually now because nothing is responding, so that's great.
Should the majority of the devices in the z-wave section have the repair button available? There are 2 that only show refresh, while the rest have both refresh and repair. That seems suspect to me.
Maybe I'll try the backup and immediate restore from backup, but I don't see how that would help if the database is corrupt as I would just be backing up the corrupt database, right?
I'm gonna tell!!! 
1 Like
Battery operated devices do not have the repair button.
4 Likes
Nope, the backup process includes a scrubbing\cleanup of the database, so when you upload the backup file, if you had any corruption it will be gone.
I believe that it is still possible to create a backup that will not properly restore. @gopher.ny has been continuing to add checks and protections wherever possible, but I've encountered this as recently as 2.3.6.134.
2 Likes
Nothing, (except my wife, evidently) is perfect. Truth.
3 Likes
The battery devices not having a repair makes sense, never thought of that. Still not used to having a way to take an in-depth look at all the z-wave devices, not that it's done any good at this point. All of the troubles show devices as good with decent RSSI, just really long response times.
I did the backup restore thing right after my last post and let it do it's thing to rebuild or whatever it seems to do when nothing works for a day or so afterward. It's still totally screwed. Sometimes things work, sometimes they take 30 seconds to respond, sometimes they go to pending and bog down the c8 and no other z-wave devices work, some times I can initialize them and they'll come back to life, some devices haven't worked at all, ever... It's all seemingly random and changes daily for no rhyme or reason. Something will work all day and then I'll get up the next morning and it won't respond.
I'm gonna begin making virtual copies of everything z-wave to transfer my app associations over to so I can wipe z-wave and start from scratch again. Which really sucks because just shy of 50 devices, some of which are in electrical boxes behind fixtures, others which always struggle to pair in the first place like the garage door opener controllers etc. Not a lot of time to work on this with the holidays coming up, but my wife is getting pretty pissed off not being able to turn stuff on or off or lights strobing or seemingly having a mind of their own when the zwave commands from a switch get back logged because it's lagging significantly, but not broken and 10 button presses all activate in quick succession or spread out over a minute or two.
Once again, it's really sad as z-wave been nearly perfect and snappy for the past 9 months up until these recent troubles, save for the short blip in the summer.
Wish me luck.
Thats not necessary. If you reset the zwave radio the devices on the device list will be untouched AFAIK, they just wont be linked to a physical device anymore. You will want to edit the DNI and add something to them like _OLD so that when you pair new devices there is not a DNI conflict.
Once new device is paired you can move your apps over manually, or use Swap Apps. If you use swap apps check everything over after, sometimes the data does not move correctly (known bug they are working on).
Then finally, delete the old devices from the device list.
2 Likes
Are you 100% that this will work that way though? My main worry is that when I have to exclude every device before I can re-pair them, doing so will delete them from hubitat.
Re-naming the DNI first will prevent the device from being excluded from Hubitat. I just did a bunch of this. Steps: 1) re-name DNI, 2) factory reset device, 3) exclude device in Hubitat (belt and suspenders), 4) include on Hubitat, 5) run Swap Apps Device, 6) verify device settings.
1 Like
If you also reset the radio first the hub will just say unknown device excluded and not remove anything from devices. But you could also rename the DNI before that as an extra precaution.
1 Like
That sounds like a decent time saver. I wasn't aware it was the dni that was referenced when removing devices. I never really knew of any purpose to change it anyway, so I guess this is one of the cases. Thanks!
The DNI is how it links the device entry to the radio entry. So normally renaming it would be a bad idea. But if you have detached devices you need to change the DNI so that new devices do not link up to them and cause all sorts of issues. This only impact Z-Wave since zigbee devices keep the same DNI if reset and paired again.
You may be going in the wrong direction that could exacerbate the problems and not solve anything. If everything was working great at one point, step back and think about what has changed? Have you added new devices that could have caused the problems? If the answer is no, then likely existing devices started to misbehave.
You mentioned a power outage as the possible culprit. That could have damaged a device or two when the power was restored, and that would be enough to destabilize a perfectly healthy mesh.
If devices are misbehaving, the problem is with what you don't see in the logs or stats. Devices can beat up the radio with events not captured by the driver. Or they may drop connection when you are not looking at the stats. When that happens, the entire mesh becomes volatile.
Narrowing down which device(s) could be the problem, and eliminating them from the mesh is the only way forward. But that could be a daunting task. For the time you spent already troubleshooting bits and pieces of your mesh, you are better off starting from scratch. Only that way you can rebuild everything and hopefully identify the problematic devices.
An alternative that I don't recommend, just as I don't recommend using sticks to remove ghosts, is getting a sniffer and start tracing the traffic between devices and the hub.
The main reason I don't recommend use of sticks and sniffers is because smart home is all about convenience and ease of use. Once you turn the maintenance of a smart home environment into a full time job, it defeats the purpose of having a smart home in the first place.
If you need help starting over, please send me a private message, and I'd be happy to help. But I think if you continue to troubleshoot problems on the hub side or try to salvage something that isn't working properly already, will only increase your dissatisfaction with your smart home and will drive you and your family members further away.
2 Likes
