My z-wave mesh is not great. It's slow and too many illogical jumps from basement to second floor and back to basement. I have tried "repairing and waiting" many times over the last month. I also tested a few other ideas and my z-wave devices are still slower than my ST hub was before I switched to Hubitat.
Part of the problem is my hub's poor location. I'd like to relocate it to a more central area, but I also don't want to trigger a z-wave mesh Armageddon. Are there any hints or best practices before I pull the trigger and move my hub to the other room? FYI: The knowledge base has tons of information to build a great network when starting fresh, but scattered tips about improving an existing mesh. All help is appreciated!
Probably not a best practice, but this is the approach i took (and it worked out better than i expected):
Shutdown and Relocate hub
Power off/air gap repeaters within 15ft of the prior location
Exclude/reinclude any repeaters within 15 ft of new location
Repair any older (non plus) devices
Work out from the hub turning on and off each switch (from the device where possible)
Power back on the repeaters that were turned off
I did this about 6 months ago. My mesh was totally screwed up for about a week, though I never lost communication with any device. Eventually it sorted itself out but took a week to do so.
BTW, the "illogical jumps" you see in the mesh are normal, and likely won't go away after you move your hub. I believe no one outside of Silicon Labs knows the mesh algorithm and the decisions it makes.
Actually, when moving the hub is better to run a full mesh. That's pretty much the only time is recommended, unless you let the radio build the routes on its own, which will do, but may take a while and the Z-Wave experience may be rocky for a few days.
If your handy with a soldering gun you might want to research the antenna upgrade in this forum.
Lots of us have done it and and I now have 90-95% DIRECT; up from 50%.
That's almost identical to my experience and setup except for my pesky Kwikset door locks which refuse to DIRECT and have zillions of route changes and multi-sec delays.
I don’t have any experience with qwikset. I had a hard go with schlage first the switched to an Alfred DB2. It is direct with S2 but seems to only be capable of 40kbps … my only device not at 100kbps. Oh and today I am down to 3 devices not directly connected.
Yes, I can do this, but hoping it won't be necessary. My network has only 32 z-wave devices and my house is compact.
However, when I used ST, my z-wave was super reliable and fast. So my specific arrangement can't be 100% to blame. I guess I'm talking myself into a hardware fix.. lol
I didn't see this anywhere for your devices but when I came over from the Dark SIde (since the Kickstarter!) I soon realized/informed that ST optomises for devices that need Polling so they react and update quicker.
HE does not do anything well with older Z-Wave; you have to poll yourself. If you are Gen2 (500+ chipset) your'e fine.
I had to upgrade all of my switches/outlets to see the no-cloud benefits.
Uggg.... I have the 700 hub and half of my devices are not Z-Wave Plus. What should I do with polling to make it more reliable for these older devices.
There is a built-in app called Z-Wave Poller.
You can install that and add your non-plus devices.
I used WebCore as that's what I'm used to and set up a poller through that.
Everything I have is new now but I still have to poll my Kwikset/Weiser locks even though they are Z-Wave plus. They just don't report for minutes at a time without polling.
I believe the only thing HE doesn't do for older Z-Wave devices is automatically poll them for their current state. Instead, you have to manually add the Poller app and configure polling for those devices you care to poll for. And I think you only need to do that for things like non-plus Z-wave switches, where the state might not be updated if you manually hit the switch.
I have one non-plus switch left installed, and it's in a location that it never manually gets touched. Thus, I don't bother to poll it (and add extra Z-wave mesh traffic).
So I only must poll non-plus devices that don't report state? I don't need to do that for such things like contact sensors, right? Since state (ie. open/closed) is the only thing it does. But for devices like a wall switch, it doesn't report back to Hubitat when physically toggled (therefore Hubitat doesn't know that the light is on/off correctly)? Am I getting that right?
This one by @lewis.heidrick is the one that convinced me and by the size of the thread, a lot of people have followed his instructions. I have not used the exact same antenna as he has, but did use the same external connectors for the antennas. Once you have the connectors in place, you can swap antenna's and evaluate performance.
I am using this one of zwave. It is intended for a cell phone in a car and has a six foot thin coax. The peak gain at 915mhz is only about 3.5dbi but it still made a drastic improvement. My house is a two story + basement with ~ 850 sg ft per floor. I have my hub at the top of my entrance closet at the front of the house. I did not have the height between the shelf and the ceiling for the larger antenna. Plus I like the idea of a little more separation between the zigbee & zwave antennas.
