Does anyone have any insights on which Z-wave or Zigbee locks work best with Hubitat? My home has six (Yes... six) exterior doors that all need new locks and I was considering upgrading them to smart locks. So far I haven't been able to find a good resource for comparing the various brands and options. I do know I want one with at least 10 distinct digit buttons rather than one that puts multiple digits on the same button. Other than that I'm a bit lost.
In addition to Hubitat compatibility I'm also curious about people's experiences with battery life, how easy the batteries are to replace and if they are batteries that can be easily replaced with rechargeables?
Do you want to be able to rekey them yourself? That is why I went with the kwikset 914. It has the ability to rekey yourself so all locks use the same physical key. Before that I was headed to Yale. If calling a locksmith out is an option then Yale would be a good choice.
That's a great point, I hadn't thought of that. That would be a very nice feature to have. Right now we have the six exterior doors on the house, plus doors on a barn and shed that all have matching keys so rekeying all those could get expensive if I needed a locksmith.
Works great, read the codes already in the locks and lets me change, add & modify. My lock was already in Hubitat and working like this with the built-in driver before I added lock manager. Been so long since I installed it but I believe you will first have to do some programming of the master code via the lock, following the menu of button presses in the lock manual.
I pulled the trigger on the Kwikset 914 but I cannot get them to work with Lock Code Manager at all. LCM won't even let me check the boxes next to the locks. I posted details about that issue here: Lock Code Manager - Same user, same code, multiple locks
What driver are you using for the Kwikset? Generic Z-Wave Lock? I also noticed that Hubitat doesn't auto-detect these as locks when they are discovered, so i had to manually update the driver to "Generic Z-Wave Lock":
Did you click configure in the driver details? If it doesn’t auto detect the lock driver and you had to switch the driver, it’s necessary click configure to send the driver details to the device.
If it’s not showing codes, you can then try get codes, and then wait until it’s done. If you open a log window in another tab, before you click get codes, you can see the codes being captured. If it’s working correctly.
Yes I did hit configure first thing. I can also manually set codes, and I can see them with "getCodes". However they often can't be deleted with "deleteCode". They are in fact deleted from the lock because I can no longer unlock the lock with that code but Hubitat still shows the code in the driver details.
it sounds like the driver needs some love for your lock, but is it far from the hub with no repeater? i wonder if it's not updating properly due to a weak signal.
Well I've got 6 locks total. One of them is a little far (The one to the garage) but there are a ton of repeaters (Z-Wave Light switches and outlets) in between and I've run Z-wave repair umpteen times to try and resolve this. I also have several battery powered Z-wave devices like: motion, temperature, garage door open/close sensors, water valves, etc, and they all communicate fine and are further from the hub than the lock.
They are pairing securely so I don't know if that impacts the ability for things like light switches to be able to repeat the signal:
When I do Z-Wave repair I don't see the locks mentioned in the Z-Wave repair logging showing any route updates or anything. The repair process seems to stop before it reaches the Z-Wave ID numbers for the locks.
Only the locks need to be securely paired. The other stuff will be slower if it's securely paired since it makes three round trips when securely paired. Not sure if that slows down the rest of the mesh or would have anything to do with this issue. I'm a lot less experienced in Z-Wave than @mike.maxwell or many of the other owners here.
I know the locks are the only things that pair securely. My question was more aimed at whether non-secure z-wave devices like lights and outlets would still act as repeaters for the secure devices such as locks. I'm just not seeing any of the locks showing up in the z-wave repair so it seems like they aren't.
Long Answer: It depends.
ZWave Locks fall into a category called Barrier Devices and as the name implies, they are used around the "edge" and protect the inside. The spec says they MUST NOT work in not paired securely. That's the easy part, the next is, how to protect the exchange of security details. For a while, the "keepers of the ZWave" said to lower the power output of the radio, what came to be called "whisper" and thus the hub had to be close to "hear" the radio. Then it was noted that locks especially are battery driven and burning through batteries at a high rate would be a bad thing! The "keepers of the ZWave" introduced Beaming. This is a feature that is NOT on the lock, but on the Repeater devices: outlets and switches, etc. The feature works by repeating the messages from the hub to the lock repeatedly. All by itself. Til the Lock wakes up (it's battery driven so it's sleeping a lot) and gets the message.
I have a single Yale lock. When I migrated it to HE, I could NOT get it to pair securely. The lock and the hub were inches apart, would pair every time, just never securely. I gave up and moved on to the next device, leaving the lock Excluded. Lucky me, the next device I tried was a Linear (GoControl/Iris) Garage Door Opener.... also a Barrier device. Same issue, would pair, never securely. Again, eventually I gave up and moved on to the remaining devices in that area. The area was thick with ZWave devices. Nine devices in a 20 foot circle. All AC powered except one. That one paired well, indicating the mesh was "good enough."
An hour or two later I was done with that area and had added the automations for those surrounding devices. I decided to just try another Include to capture some logs, etc. preparing to write a message, much like the ones above. Took my Phone near the device, but left the hub far away in it's usual spot. Did the dance with the lock and it paired as expected, SECURELY too!! That was a shock.
So I tried the Garage Door.. same, paired securely.
Thus I extrapolate: beaming and whisper are not used together on those two devices. I don't have to be close, as long as I have beaming, it works just how I'd want it -- if I was keeper of the zwave.
The "keepers of the ZWave" introduced Beaming. This is a feature that is NOT on the lock, but on the Repeater devices: outlets and switches, etc. The feature works by repeating the messages from the hub to the lock repeatedly. All by itself. Til the Lock wakes up (it's battery driven so it's sleeping a lot) and gets the message.
