Issues with Iris Smart Plugs as Z-Wave Repeaters

replying to my initial post....i didn't see the posts above that centralite has ( or maybe has) gone out of business...too bad...i liked their products

They're definitely not out of business any more. Ezlo bought them a while back. Customer service is definitely up and they're also selling products.

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Awesome....i have a ton of stuff that i brought over from IRIS that is made by centralite...and ive been very pleased with the majority of it. Glad they made it through some type of restructure.

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Just an update to the above. I contacted centralite. Apparently they don’t support firmware updates to the 3210l.
Reply to my question.

Thank you for providing the information. As of right now our Zigbee protocol is limited to the functions a device is intended to deliver; meaning, a door sensor will simply act like so. Having Over-the-Air updates for any device is not yet available in our platform.

What is the best way to troubleshoot a Z-Wave mesh? I have been having nothing but issues with my August Pro even though I have like 3 Iris 3210-L plugs in between the hub and the lock.

Are Zigbee with a ZWave chip added. You must include them correctly or they don't exist on YOUR ZWave mesh.

Are those the ONLY wall powered ZWave? No in-wall Switches, Dimmers or Outlets?

Because you are describing a poor ZWave mesh, despite having what sounds like a good attempt.

It's a challenge to do but the only serious way to evaluate your Mesh is via ZNiffer.

Costs $40 for another ZWave USB stick and you flash new code onto it. It's forever a ZNiffer then. You then run the ZNiffer on your PC and watch the traffic. You can see if it's taking the path you imagine it should. You can then physically adjust your repeaters to optimize.

There's a whole topic for ZWave Zniffer.. this probably is better off over under that topic...

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I have no special knowledge that hasn't been repeated time and again here in the forum. It's very typical isolation strategy... make your network as minimal as you can until it works great, then add things back until it breaks. There's always ALWAYS a misbehaving or non-beaming Z-Wave relay at fault.

Unlike Zigbee which is mystery foo that just works or not, a Z-Wave mesh can be easily debugged even without a zniffer. But spin up a zniffer and you can get a multi-dimensional view of all routing in a few minutes.

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Yes, they are all included as Z-Wave devices and show up in the Z-Wave Details table. Now if that does not necessarily mean they were included "correctly" I am not sure if they are.

Yes, they are my only devices main-powered Z-Wave devices, thinking about getting Inovelli dimmers to replace my Kasa Dimmers, do you think those would go a long way to helping my mesh?

Thank you, I will take a look.

Does this mean exclude everything and then include one at a time or would having them unplugged and then plugging them in one at a time be sufficient?

Powering off is just fine. Zero need to exclude except when you're going to leave the device unpowered forever, or want to re-attach. People will tell you to wait hours for the mesh to stabilize but IMHO when you're testing by removing a suspect device it's absence will prove or disprove a theory in just minutes. Z-Wave adapts and rebuilds the mesh very quick. That said, the quick path fix is not always how it will stabilize in the end so if you have multiple problems in the mesh it may reappear.

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I’ve found its best To include devices in the location you will be using them in. Once done then trigger a neighbour network update for that device so it finds nodes between it and your hub.

This was the case on the Vera platform and I assume Hubitat works the same way (I don’t have a C7 yet to test this).

P.S. having Mains powered zwave nodes in each room will ensure your battery zwave nodes Work well in the mesh.

Yes, but...

I agree with everything that you've written, but

With my size zwave mesh (60-80 Zwave plus).
Zniffering takes time, and patience, and a lot of work.
It takes a long time to figure out a device that's gone wrong.
(In my humble opinion).

As you said, classic isolation approach, works (but slowly if you have a lot of devices).

I also found that what works, is:
While you have 1 device (e.g. a PC) zniffering,
with another device turn on a switch.
Examine carefully the route in the zniffer output.

Patience, patience, patience...

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I agree!!!

Also as I discovered your zniffing location matters - you can get inconsistent results with devices that are on the edge of your detection range.

sigh.. so much dynamically changing data to parse through.

These may actually be the root cause of your problem. We have had many tickets from customers using the Z-Wave portion of these outlets who ran into big troubles with their Z-Wave mesh. The problem resolved itself once these were successfully removed from the network. (emphasis on successfully because these are known to leave stranded Z-Wave device behind, and customers who use the Zigbee portion of these will have terrible Z-Wave mesh performance).

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What is the procedure for doing the exclude on this device?
I have it doing "double duty" as a zigbee and zwave plus device.
However, if this could be the cause of my issues, how do I "get rid of it"? (i.e. exclude)

I think the "bunch" number is actually 8, if I remember correctly.

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To exclude the Z-Wave repeater portion of the 3210-L, I have found the following procedure to work the best.

  • bring the 3210|-L into the same room as the Hubitat hub and plug it in (do not factory reset it!)
  • bring up the device details page for this 3210-L’s Z-wave repeater device
  • click Remove Device to start the Z-wave exclusion process
  • press the 3210-L’s button 8 times very, very quickly (the outlet’s internal relay should not be clicking on and off during this process, except maybe at the very end of the 8 presses.)

If you’ve done it properly, Hubitat should report the successful removal of the Z-Wave repeater device. If not, do NOT force remove the Z-wave repeater. Start the process again until until you get it removed.

Hope this helps.

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OK.
I now have a new one to report: (I couldn't make this up!)
My Iris 3210-L repeater is called Upstairs Office Outlet.
I pressed it 8 times quickly, while the Hub was in exclude mode, and I got the following:


Yes, It excluded the wrong device!!!!

Even more astounding.
It's not in my Hubitat zwave list anymore (Main Hall Lights), but it's still in the list as far as the zwave controller program is considered. Wow! I never expected this to happen.
Maybe my zwave network is really "borked".

That page is not the device specific page. Therefore, it appears you used the General Exclusion feature, instead of the device specific exclusion.

Yes, I used the general device exclusion page.

But I had nothing to do with main hall lights...

One more thing regarding these outlets... there are two different firmware versions for the 3210-L outlets. The early firmware was known to have issues with the Z-wave repeater side of things. I believe those issues were resolved in the new firmware for these devices, but I am not 100% certain.

Unfortunately, there is no longer any way to update the firmware on these devices that I know of. One way to determine the firmware version is to pair the device with a SmartThings hub and then look at the device details in the ST Web IDE. ST can update the firmware on Iris v2 Motion and Contact sensors, but not these outlets.

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