The importance of repeaters in our homes

Just a funny story from the past week about my system.

I had been a ST user for over 6 years but have had more and more issues with automations and such. With everything they have been changing, I wasn't sure why stuff wasn't working anymore. Figured I needed a complete reset so rather then sticking with ST I jumped over to HE. Beyond the headaches of switching everything over, and learning the ins and outs of HE, everything had been going well until this last week.

All of the lights (Zwave or Bond) would still work fine through direct app or voice controls, but none of the automations that used motion sensing (zigbee) would work. I was just starting to think that I just have some faulty equipment that worked fine after the reset for a while but were finally starting to act up again. Well, I went into the bedroom we have setup to get my fiancee's eldest son's school bag that he had left at my house over the weekend and found one of my zigbee plugs I have placed around the house to also work as a repeater sitting on the table next to the outlet I had it plugged into. So during one of his recent visits it had apparently been in the way of plugging in something and he just popped it out and never plugged it back in.

So this past week when I was trying to figure out why my system that had been working flawlessly (aside from my rule machine setup mistakes) and suddenly started having issues was actually fine once I plugged it back in. I have tried to place those plugs and my dedicated zwave repeaters in places that we don't usually use the outlets but kids will always try and use the ones that don't make sense. We had a good laugh about it, and to be fair I had not ever explained to them what they were or why they needed to be left alone.

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I replaced a couple of perfectly working ZWave outlets with a Zigbee version specifically for this reason. The Zigbee repeaters would be missing, and I'd find them in a nearby drawer. "Those look ugly. Our guests don't need to see that." "Ok, but that means they can't use the light or fans over there either"

"oh."

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