I have a handful of devices in the front yard for my halloween display. But they've been intermittently unreliable. My house has a stucco exterior with a metal mesh, which I'm sure makes signal penetration very poor. But I still don't understand the routing my mesh seems to have. For example, these first two devices are right next to each other in the front, but have this routing:
Device
Route
0x24
01 -> 20 -> 28 -> 27 -> 24 100kbps
0x28
01 -> 28 100kbps
0x26
01 -> 20 -> 28 -> 26 9.6kbps
The third one is about 4' away from the other two. What's puzzling is that the first and third go through 0x20 -> 0x28, but 0x28 connects directly to the hub. So why do those two show as going through 0x20?
Trying to explain the madness of Z-wave routing would be like deciphering schizophrenic ramblings.
There are a couple of possibilities. So each route would be figured and stored for each device individually. I am not sure if it takes into consideration the routes for the devices it hops through or not. One guess is at one point 01 > 28 was not working, so it tried 01 > 20 > 28 which worked. Device 24 got stuck with that crazy route somehow, and maybe it is working OKish. In the meantime 01 > 20 > 28 (for device 28) failed or was slow, so it tried 01 > 28 again which worked, so it started using that direct route. The other devices have not totally failed hopping through 20 yet so they keep hanging onto that route.
You can try doing repairs and it might figure a new route for a while but if nothing is working great it will just keep bouncing around and you will have constant problems with the devices responding.
