I've had a Hubitat C7 for a few months now. I use it to control two Schlage door locks and ten Minoston mini plugs over the Z-Wave protocol. Everything works about as expected. However, one of the two door locks frequently goes unresponsive for days at a time, then will randomly come back.
This door lock (the back door of the house) is far enough away from the hub that it can only be reached via the mesh network of plugs. When I run Z-Wave repair and review the topology, there are many paths for which the lock (ID: 12) and the hub (ID: 01) can communicate:
01 -> OC -> 12
01 -> OE -> 12
01 -> 13 -> 12
01 -> 14 -> 12
01 -> 17 -> 12
01 -> 19 -> 12
01 -> 1A -> 12
When Z-Wave repair is running, it will occasionally fail to find node 12. I've found that restarting the hub almost always resolves this. Today, the latest repair has no issues with node 12. Despite that, the device's status is "Pending" with no route. It will not respond to anything from Hubitat. My only options are to Refresh (does nothing), Remove, or Replace.
I thought it might be the batteries on the lock, so I replaced them. It worked great for about 10 minutes and is right back at this state.
In the last month, I have tried going through the Unpair-Pair process, but that is a PITA. It requires me removing the hub from its location and running a long ethernet cord to the back door. There has to be a better solution than doing that regularly. I doubt it is a problem with the door lock, since it works flawlessly whenever it has direct line-of-sight with the hub. But it should work over the mesh, especially with seven 1-hop paths to take.
I've checked that all devices have "Hub Mesh" enabled. I should note that none of them are Z-Wave Plus (does this matter?).
Any help solving this and getting this door lock into a reliable state would be helpful.
I have screenshots available, but it appears this forum does not allow any kind of media or links.
Join the Hub Owners group on here. That will allow you to post images anywhere.
Model numbers matter. What model are your locks and plugs?
Zwave locks work in a mode where they really need a repeater nearby that supports beaming. Most zwave plus powered devices support beaming.
Hub Mesh is only used when you have more than one Hubitat hub and want to share devices across hubs. It has nothing to do with zwave meshing. You can disable that if you want, won't make any difference with only a single hub.
The plugs are Ministon Miniplugs MP21Z. They make a Z-Wave Plus variant, so I'll get one for each door. I added (and am using) the driver provided by the manufacturer.
Since I started this topic, I found recommendations to unplug the hub for some time. I did that for about 15 minutes, powered it back up, ran a Z-Wave repair, rebooted, ran another Z-Wave repair, and rebooted again. At this point, the lock is responding. But I'm fully expecting it to stop working in a few hours.
I did not get a screenshot of my Z-Wave Details page before the power-off procedure, but here it is in its current/working state.
If you can, let things ride for a day or more, don't do any more reboots or repairs in the meantime. That will allow your Z-Wave details page to fill in more info and see if you're getting lots of route changes over time on any of your devices.
Regarding Z-Wave repairs, I prefer to start w/individual repairs on the specific devices that I'm having problems with, rather than slamming the mesh w/a full repair. You do have a small number of devices, so not as big an issue for you.
The alliance conformance sheet for the MP21Z says the Plus variant does support beaming. They may have released a previous version of the MP21Z that doesn't support beaming and/or is non plus. I've seen where older iterations/compliance docs are replaced if a newer version comes out with the same model/conformance ID.
The lock also must support FLiR which it looks like yours does.
If your repeaters near your locks are pre-plus or known to not support beaming, I would definitely replace them for best operation and longest battery life in your locks.
Let your mesh settle and capture stats, maybe repost your details page in a couple days. But looking at the overall state, you've got most connections at 100Kbps, 2 at 40kbps and none at 9.6, which is great. Most devices are one or two hops. 0 route changes (although you just rebooted) with high neighbor counts. No ghosts. All this shows sign of a strong mesh.
@coreystup You're right. As it turns out, all my plugs ARE Z-Wave Plus. The packaging/labeling is very confusing, but the back of every plug has the Z-Wave Plus glyph on it. They're all the same model number: MP21Z.
The back door is no longer working again. It stopped two days ago and is again unresponsive. It seems as though as the mesh settles, it becomes less reliable.
I would want to see the Zwave details after the hub has been running for at least 24 hrs. Some of the metrics reset when rebooted so right after a reboot the info is not that useful. Please specify how long it has been running when you post it.
