Well, it finally happened, despite having at least two repeaters within the proximity of a number of outdoors positioned Zigbee devices I had THE ONE that the majority of them seem to migrate to go on holiday. Don't get me wrong, I like these Ikea Repeaters. The nightmare is that what I always feared happening....happened.
Thanks to Device Activity Check App ([RELEASE] Device Activity Check - Get notifications for "inactive" devices)
I realized a whole buncha devices stopped talking to the hub. Assuming there was no way in hell all those batteries went out at the same time and that there was no EMP or Solar Flare event I suspected either: a) failure of the repeater that seems to collect more devices than I want it to, or b) the rain.
So here's some interesting (to me) outcomes that some of you might already have experienced. I got a number of different devices reporting their "cumulative" state changes over the past days all at once. In particular some Visonic contact sensors giving me the activity that transpired over the incommunicado duration. Granted some of these incur like two events a day, one Open, and one Close. The temps were not "caught up" that I can see... But the Open/Closed all came as if they'd happened in that minute right after the repeater came back online.
I haven't finished interpreting what all has transpired here. I unplugged the repeater and plugged it back in to get it to "shake off" whatever malaise it was experiencing...and it did...which is when all the devices started reporting again. I suspect the repeater may be suffering from going into it's third winter/summer extremes in a weather box exposed to whatever the outdoor temps go to.
I'm just sharing the experience for whatever that may be worth to folks. I remain befuddled over what I can do to get the Zigbee mesh to do what I want it to do in order to be more fail-safe. I would have suspected some of the devices to have re-routed...but they didn't. Some of them are really "out there" distance-wise and this one repeater (for whatever reason, including perhaps being backed by a metal wall) tends to "get them all".
Makes me wonder if I should have a backup repeater not far from the one that seems to be currently favored ...so there are TWO in that relative position to back each other up. But that never seems prudent when you're talking radios. Maybe in this case 20' away might be fine. But...would devices reroute/re-path upon the failure of one. Only the Zigbee God likely knows.
Thinking out loud. Thanks for your time.
P.S. Doesn't a DEVICES Forum make sense to have for the Community ?