I was looking at my Z-Wave Mesh Details app and noticed that every one of my battery operated Z-wave devices have an Error Count > zero; some in the hundreds. Not one of my hard-wired devices has an Error. I have noticed that when it is raining, or about to rain, my normally reliable battery operated devices start becoming unreliable. These devices include motion sensors and switches from several different companies, batteries are good, Route is Direct.
Any idea why all of my battery operated devices have Errors when the humidty is near 100%?
Rain fade really doesn't mess with Z-wave frequencies and only had a significant impact at around 1ghz. If your devices were right on the edge of being able to communicate directly with the hub, it may be beneficial to have wired repeating devices in the network to allow other routes.
Another thing could just be reporting errors that happen all the time as the hub sends a request and the device doesn't wake up in time. I was just dealing with that on some smoke detectors. A dev here wrote a script to delay the respond time and it cleared up a lot of errors.
Maybe test the equipment in the rain and see if it's critical or just sleepy stuff?
