Hello,
New to HE. I have a Inovelli LZW30 basic switch. I had to move my HE to 3 feet away to pair it. It will only work if my HE is less then 9 feet away. I have other Z-waves that are a bit farther away but work fine.
I have zigbee lights all over the house and they are all fine.
What can i do to get more range out of this switch? I bought it to be a repeater in the middle of my house, but it can't reach my hub, normally 15 feet away. I don't have a big house. 900sqf.
Any help would be great.
I have 6 of the red series LZW30-SN and I haven't had any range issues with them. Do you only have 1, maybe its a bad switch?
I only have one of the LZW30-SN switches in production, but when I was using one on my test hub (that had only its own Z-Wave radio plus a Dome Range Extender--each hub upstairs/downstairs room away from the other, so one ceiling/floor between each hop if it was indeed using the repeater), I had to position it just right in order to get reliable communication. I was wondering if it might be problematic, but I moved the same switch to my "real" Z-Wave network with a lot more repeaters, and it's fine now. That's just an anecdote, and given the weak mesh I was testing it on, I have no idea if my experience is valid for drawing any conclusions, but I thought I'd share since it doesn't seem too different from what you're experiencing now.
You could use the "range test" feature on the switch (hold the config button for 5-10 seconds, and if it turns green, it's either in the range of the hub or a repeater)--that would be a way to verify what you're seeing is indeed a Z-Wave range problem. If it looks like a range issue, what does your Z-Wave mesh really look like? You have devices farther away, but do you have any other repeaters closer to the hub? That could help. Z-Wave (and Zigbee) routing is mostly a mystery to most humans, but since Z-Wave is limited to 4 hops, a piece of advice often repeated is that a repeater close to the hub can help with range since devices will try to minimize hops in their route and pick the farthest repeater from the device that is also closest to (or communicating the strongest with) the hub for that reason.
Thanks for the responses. I only have one switch. I have a Zooz motion detector. if you run it off of USB power it is supposed to be a repeater as well. I'm going to try that and see if it expands the mesh. wish I had done some more reading about Z-Wave before I purchased my door lock. it was my first item. And I've had zero trouble with it. So I bought the zooz's motion after it. And it has been slow and wonky. It did work better with my SmartThings hub. I thought by buying the switch to act as a repeater closer to everything would help solve my problem. Moving forward I think all my items will be zigbee from now on. Thanks everyone.
I put the Zooz on USB power. I moved the HE hub closer to the switch. Everything seems to be working now. The Zooz still dose not seem to have the sensor range it did when on ST hub. Used to kick on from much farther away. Zooz response time is faster now then ever. I can live with it.
Other things to consider.
Zigbee is great for motion and contact sensors for response time as there are few Z-Wave devices that respond as fast. However Zigbee is limited as each repeater (hub included) can only support 32 devices, so you need to make sure to have enough repeaters to spread the load. Zigbee has both ZLL and ZHA standards and while Hubitat works with either, the ZLL hardwired devices that act as repeaters will likely cause issues so most people put any ZLL hardwired devices they may have on a seperate hub either another Hubitat hub or something like a HUE hub.
Z-Wave repeaters don't have the direct connection limitation and as long as you make sure each device you get is Z-Wave Plus they should update their status within a few seconds. Your options will be very limited for some devices and may cost more if you stay with Zigbee only.
