LR from what I understand is better at battery management then most other devices.
You'd think there'd be a price to pay for the super range.
On any spread spectrum, adjustable data rate protocol the answer is "it depends". Usually it is less though, except at the max power/max range/max interference/crappiest antenna scenario.
If you use LR in a house, for instance, it is likely going to use LESS battery as it can talk faster/use less radio time. That is something non-LR can't do.
On my LoRaWAN devices (LoRa is very similar to how Zwave LR works) even with junk PCB antennas every device winds up going to the lowest, or next to lowest power/best data rate/lowest spreading factor (which equals lowest battery usage).
LoRa example below.
- Graph is airtime used.
- The Purple device and Blue device are both transmitting the same amount of data.
- Purple is using the slowest/worst data rate (max battery usage)
- Blue is using the best data rate (min battery usage)
Here you can see to transmit the same amount of data, the purple takes a TON more airtime than the blue (~6.6x more). More airtime usage=longer radio transmits=more battery used.
Airtime usage graph:
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Any update on LR support yet? Hub chipset excitement happened way back when with really old posts about how it will be introduced in a future firmware, but a lot of silence from the Hubitat team since. This seems much more important as it's "here" and many of us have devices that can support LR than perhaps work on other functionality for emerging specs. If it's not going to happen, can the dev team just say so?
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There are more Matter devices on the market, probably driving their decision to prioritize adding Matter support. Now that it is done, I anticipate adding LR support will be high on the list of development priorities.
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Every last one of my LR capable devices I have ZERO interest in ever running as LR. At least not anytime in like the next decade.
Anything connected as LR that's mains-powered will NOT function as a Z-wave repeater. So unless you have all of your battery powered devices also running as LR, switching over mains-powered stuff to LR will just degrade your mesh. And since every last one of my LR-capable devices are mains-powered, I don't have any interest in removing devices that currently function as Z-wave repeaters.
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You must not have any battery operated LR devices then... That is one area where there is tremendous benefit in LR in terms of battery savings.
I have 103 mains Zwave devices. My mesh won't miss a few that are in ugly areas (and don't have anything routing through them right now anyway) moving to LR to take advantage of the extended range.
But I'm not trying to be combative. Just pointing out that there is a place for LR, and everyone's use cases are different. Yours is likely 100% valid for you.
Nope. Well, unless the Zooz "XS" stuff I have now has a firmware update for it. Everything else is all mains powered.
Yeah, I have over 100 devices too, but maybe half of them are battery. There's definitely a few LR capable devices in my mesh right now that would leave a significant hole if I ran them as LR. There's a few others that have a dozen other repeaters within a few feet.
But doesn't change the fact that I'm not at all concerned about LR support until there's LR capable stuff that's battery powered available..
Got it.
All of the NEW zooz battery devices are LR capable. I have all of them.
I don't know if they will release an LR firmware for their 700 series models or not, I didn't ask them that.
When I bought a bunch of their new "XS" stuff, it was "LR coming soon". I just took a look and they're now LR supported, but every one of them I own is within 5 feet of a mains-powered repeater, so doesn't really make any difference to put them on LR. Just extra work to exclude/re-include them.
Right now only their "800LR" models support Zwave LR.
I'll go back and ask them if they are going to add Zwave LR support to their older 700 series devices (as I'm curious, even though I'm scrapping all of mine in favor of the 800LR models anyway).
And extra battery life to be gained... But that may not be important in your specific applications.
Last I heard from them the answer was they were leaving the 700 stuff as all non-LR, even if it's technically capable. Same for Inovelli from what I've heard. Basically the 800 series can do both on the same firmware. 700 doesn't have enough memory for both, and I remember Inovelli saying that they couldn't even OTA their 700 series stuff to LR because there's not enough memory left to do handle it. Zooz is likely in the same boat. You'd need to flash them wired to get them on LR firmware.
So the only way they'd have 700 series stuff with LR would be if they shipped a new revision with it. But since 700 series chips are basically non-existent at this point, that's probably not happening either.
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Of course all of this is academic on Hubitat, as there is no LR support yet. 
But there are other hubs (albeit inferior ones) that can do LR for now... So I can wait.
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True. Last 700 series device I made on my gecko dev platform it was definitely one or the other for firmware support. And I was doing wired upgrades, so likely never thought about the OTA limitations. That could be legit. Heck I can run a 700 series sensor out of memory just in normal use if I'm not fairly careful in my code.
I also haven't tested that specific scenario for a few firmware revs to see if they did anything to improve the space when swapping back and forth in the SDK.
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Scrapping??? I can help you properly dispose of those 
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I have exactly one real use case for LR: I want a contact sensor on my mailbox to indicate when mail has been delivered. Driveway is too long to do that over anything I've got right now, I think.
That said, I wish LR allowed for islands, where an LR device could relay for regular Z-wave devices near it over a long hop.
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So right now, Z-wave is mesh. Using multiple Z-wave controllers is usually worse since you split the mesh and that's almost always worse. With LR on everything, or even most things, the notion of using a second or third Z-wave controller becomes much more reasonable. Tho considering the range on LR, you could probably just use a single hub anyway, since it'll work up to a mile over open air.
But I wouldn't be surprised if maybe 900 series adds just that feature you're wanting. It would be a nice feature, and I'm not sure what other 'big new thing' they can add in 900 series to stay competitive.
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My point is that most networks will have a few LR devices and mostly mesh devices. If LR devices also repeated from their non-LR neighbors, they could be the beachhead that lets the hub talk to a distant enclave of devices it otherwise wouldn't reach.
That was my case too, until I got a C8 with the external antennas. Z-wave has farther range. Replaced the three spotty, at best, zigbee devices at the end of the driveway with Z-wave. Much more reliable.
Interesting idea, but that isn't possible in the spec and hardware today. Like @daniel.winks said, maybe in some future version of zwave?
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