Is there a "best practice" in regards to z-wave repair? Should I be running it on a regular basis, should I run it any time I add a new z-wave device, or should I just leave it alone unless I run into issues?
See point 4 in this informative article written by a Silicon Labs field engineer: Seven Habits of Highly Effective Z-Wave Networks for Consumers | DrZWave
TLDR: When you add or remove devices or suspect you are seeing issues
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Thanks for sharing that article. Very helpful!
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how do you remove dead nodes from the network on HE?
That is an excellent article Tony. Thanks for sharing it. Valuable information for new users and old dogs who think they know what their talking about, but keep repeating their mistakes over and over because they think it's correct, or it worked once on hub [X], so surely it must be the definitive answer and will work again on any hub. 
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Interesting that the article says that most hubs have a way to remove dead nodes. I don't think Hubitat does, does it? Interesting on the same topic I have been having Zwave trouble and emailed my UK supplier regarding some plug in units that I thought might be faulty. His reply included this about Zwave plus and network repair/heal:
"As a side note a "network heal" is largely redundant nowadays with Z-Wave Plus devices, especially in a pure Z-Wave Plus based network. Z-Wave Plus networks are mostly self-maintaining with the Z-Wave chip in the controller keeping the network up to date automatically.
A new feature of Z-Wave Plus is "explorer frames" where the controller can seek out the best routes to communicate with devices on-the-fly and automatically update their own routing table. This can mean that any network heal carried out is outdated as soon as the next explorer frame occurs"
How does the Z-Wave heal deal with Z-wave plus and regular Z-wave devices? All my devices with the exception of an older Aeotec power meter are Z-wave plus. I rarely perform heals unless there is an issue, but in the past I have unplugged the power meter so that none of the Z-wave plus devices use that node to route through.
I've just checked mine and found a dead node. Had to remove manually.
How did you do that? I have 2 dead nodes at the moment.
If I remove or move a routing device, I'll do a repair. 1/3 of my routers are still old non-plus devices.
The recommendation on ST was always to do the repair until you get no errors 3 times. Is the same true on HE? Or is one sufficient? ST never showed the logging that HE does for a z-wave repair so I was never really aware of what was happening before.
Go into the device itself and remove.
Oh wow, was that really the recommendation? Sounds excessive...
I remember a lot of people in the ST forum having problems after running a Z-Wave repair, to the point users started recommending not doing it unless really necessary. I have not seen that problem here...
By definition a dead node doesn't have an associated device to go into, that's the point.
A dead node is left in the zwave table when you force remove a device. After a few zwave repairs it will get removed apparently.
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