That's a good start and should definitely help some, a good mesh has a lot of repeaters. I typically have 2 repeaters for every battery powered device on both my zigbee and zwave. Never have any problems.
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Most of those values look typical to me based on what I see in my own network but RSSI is only one measure of the link quality (and that is the raw RF energy level being measured at a single point in time, it also includes noise). The LQI sometimes (but not always, it is often left up to the manufacturer) takes into account link error rates as an additional indicator of signal quality.
I'd still go for trying to get adequate repeaters to form a strong mesh. As a point of reference, Control4 (a high-end home automation system supplier) indicates in their 'best practices' documentation that 6 to 15 feet is often a typical effective range of a Zigbee mesh device accounting for the usual attenuation factors (they also point out that 6 to 30 feet can also be 'typical').
Every device reported 255.
As I pointed out, LQI calculation isn't standardized and may not be an absolute indicator of link quality. Give the repeaters a shot since you have them and see what happens.
Okay. I think I may buy two more and have one on each floor.
By the way, in the absence of any kind of a mesh mapping tool you might be able to get an idea how your end devices are routed by looking for RSSI values that are identical from various and devices that that are children of the same router (since the RSSI is reported on the last hop of the link). However this can also mask a problematic link segment at the originating end device if it is connecting to your hub through a router.
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At the end of the day. Most devices haven’t been a problem until 2:40 in the morning where most devices lost all connectivity. This makes me think something related to the hub???
That is around the time of day the hub usually does it's daily backup file and checks for updates. But I would think of that as more of a coincidence because your particular issue appears to be a communication related issue, which is usually resolved by adding more repeaters.
But anything is possible.
That is true, I meant it as a course of action once the repeaters have been joined to the network.
What will happen if I just install the plugs and leave it? Will the battery devices figure it out on their own? The route that is ???
They should. But it could take a while.
I suspect you already know this but the plugs have to be joined to the hub. For newbies like me it's important for the repeaters to get an ID before they will work as repeaters.
Get an ID first? Doesn’t this happen once they are joined to the hub?
I think what he means is that they should become part of the mesh by joining them with the hub before they can even be found by your battery devices.
Yes, I didn't reread the whole thread and see you talking about joining. Sorry about that, just saw the part about plugging it in and letting mesh work it out. Coming from the demographics of easily confused senior citizen the stand alone comment confused me.
This (force heal with hub off vs. just letting the network self-heal) came up in a thread a while back and makes an excellent read:
TLDR: You'll likely want to take the hub out of the loop during the zigbee heal rather than rely on the end devices to discover routers that have been newly added to the network.
Looking at Patrick’s post he suggest not forcing the devices into panic mode. It’s said it will drain the batteries....
You need to read JDRoberts explanation in the post I linked; although you can always try the self-heal first and see if that does the trick. Would make an interesting exercise.
Quick question on these.
Does the energy monitoring work?
I can't check from work, but I'll look tonight. There's a thread here: Securifi Peanut Plug Power Meter that discusses the Peanut Power Metering...
Scott
