Over the last couple of weeks my system has seemed amazingly stable and responsive. A mesh of about 130+ Z-wave devices took a while to move from the ST hub and wasn't without challenges. I had transferred some older non plus devices as part of this.
One thing I did a few weeks ago, which seems to have made a difference to stability and speed, was to get rid of the old z-wave plug in sockets and a few wired wall dimmers that I had brought over from my old house.
Since then (and waiting patiently for the mesh to rebuild over a few days) it seems things are just much better - blazing fast responses from a variety of z-wave motion and open-close sensors coupled with Leviton dimmers.
I know that z-wave plus is meant to be fully backwards compatible and that it offers better range and speed, but I hadn't expected the difference as a result of this to be so obvious. I can't exclude it being a result of recent hub firmware improvements either.
Thought this might be helpful for anyone having some frustrations with their z-wave applications - seems well worth the investment in dollars and time from my viewpoint.
HE is turning out to be a great system - my next question is whether to add a second hub and see if I can further improve on the occasional lag that occurs ... tempting with the MLK offer.
Thanks for sharing your experience. I have about 40-45 old non-Plus GE switches and dimmers that I've been on the fence about replacing. I did replace a couple of the ones that I needed to use as triggers or conditions, then created rules to refresh the rest of them once per minute in a loop.
What types of issues were you seeing prior to replacing them? I haven't had any real problems other than a delay when sending bulk commands, like turning everything off when going to bed. If I turn everything off in one rule, sometimes it would take 20-30 seconds for everything to respond. Broke all of my devices into groups of 3 with one second delays between them seemed to speed things up a lot.
I'd love to replace everything, just haven't been able to justify spending ~$1600 to do it.
Mainly slow response between sensors and lights without using an association.
I too had very slow routines - such as the Goodnight turn off - that seems faster but it's the general responsiveness of the lights to a motion sensor that seems immediately better - and less congested (ie multiple actions in sequence - opening the door, lights being triggered by motion in room, 1 and then room 2 which seems much faster. May be a' placebo' effect but seemed to happen once I had cleared all the old z-waves off the system. Maybe I will try an experiment and introduce one or two to test (but will have to wait until my wife leaves - shes been really patient and is now very much enjoying the system stability again!)
