I'm a bit new here, but have been trying to search around and didn't find much discussions about the Dome Range Extender. I picked up the range extenders to help mitigate potential issues with Schlage locks that I read about, and chose Dome over the Aeotec extenders because of the built-in nightlight. I've had the devices setup in my house for 3 or 4 days now (and have run z-wave repair), but the range extenders don't seem to be working as expected. When I go look at the z-wave routes, I see all of my devices have routes giving them 100kbps times, except for my thermostat and front door lock, which are at 40kbps. There is a range extender in the entryway 5 feet away from the front door and a range extender in the basement 3 feet away from my hubitat.
Any tips on what I could do to improve the connection to my front door? Did I make a mistake by using the Dome extenders instead of Aeotec?
Are you focusing solely on the connection speed? I honestly really ignore that data point, as its not that important in my experience. What is import is what does the route say, are all the devices direct or are some passing through repeaters? What about the RSSI and latency? Those are data points I focus on more than connection speed across the mesh.
None of the devices are passing through the 2 repeaters I have installed, except for 1. The repeater close to the front door is passing through the repeater in the basement.
The repeater near my hubitat actually has a route that travels from the hubitat to an outlet one floor above, then going back down to the repeater. This one isn't making sense to me....
I haven't added any new devices since before the weekend hoping that it'd settle itself out but things just don't seem to work as I intended them to. The only change I've made was to switch the drivers for the repeaters to be "Dome range extender", I had originally used "generic z-wave repeater".
Well, potential bad news is this might be totally normal and expected. I say that as I own four Schlage BE469ZP Z-wave Plus door locks. Within 2ft of each of those locks is at least one if not two different in-wall smart switches which act as repeaters (and actively do so for many other devices). What I have found that 98% of the time the Schlage locks ignore the in-wall repeater 2ft away and route directly back to the HE hub. I just chalk it up to the poorly designed Schlage locks or their firmware, but unknown.
Not unusual for repeaters to sit unused for a while before devices start using them - I had a couple sit for over a month. As to placement, remember that the device will attempt to make the largest hop possible with the first and possibly subsequent hops so the closest repeater will possibly never be used by the device.
This information really helps. I was under the impression that devices would start picking up the repeaters after a few days based on other discussions I've seen about optimizing the mesh network.
I'll just let the devices do their thing then and see what happens over time.
