Can anyone tell me what the Zigbee network rebuild does, in C8... I've used it to try and resolve an an ongoing issue i have with Zigbee devices simply not responding (sporadically) but i cant say that it helps.
thx
It does what it sounds like. It wipes the zigbee network routing table so the routes among devices can be rebuilt.
is there any harm in doing it , multiple times a day.. the reason i ask is that I have sporadic devices that randomly dont respond but seconds/minutes later they do..
Im trying to get to the bottom of this and have tried a million things including moving channels on HE and on my home wifi, changing the signal strength on HE.. nothing seems to correct my issue. Im wondering if it could be my zigbee switches.. they are GE/Jasco 48856.
After the past few weeks and zigbee headaches, in hindsight I feel like I created more issues by tinkering and changing a bunch of stuff to get it back. Out of desperation I let things just soak for a few days and everything slowly healed.
FWIW, I've never done the rebuild because it fails for me and requires a reboot. I do have my power bumped down to 8 though. Channel is 20, where it's been for years.
I did find occasionally I had to power cycle plugs/repeaters to get them to respond again. I kind of feel like that helped things along. Total I think it took about 4 days on .118 for everything to get back to normal. Everything is still good 3 more days later on .121.
Not saying this is a solution to your problem, just sharing my experiences. 
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thanks for sharing - that actually helps - like a "C8 Anonymous" healing club.... i looked at my hub logs and found that my zigbee radio shuts off repeatedly throughout the day... This happened when they released C8 but appeared to have stopped with v113.. then restarted with v118 and continues with v121..
I'm thinking about changing my core switches to Zwave in desperation.
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This may be a side effect (all I've seen to this effect is one user noting that the child/route info endpoint data made more sense afterwards), but it's not really the full story. What it actually does is backs up the Zigbee radio, erases it, and restores that backup — like what happens during a migration (except this is all on the same hub). It apparently helps with certain problems, though I'd imagine the intent is to figure out how to address those without needing to offer this as a workaround, and it's probably not something most people (certainly not those whose networks are working properly) would need to do.
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There are probably other ways to try to get to the bottom of problematic zigbee behavior without resorting to that kind of zigbee rebuild multiple times a day.
Interesting. And that is what 'Rebuild' does and not Zigbee Radio 'Reboot' ?
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What I described is the rebuild; I believe reboot is just that [EDIT: to be clear, I mean radio reboot only], except without the need to power cycle the hub (but the option to rebuild on reboot would be the same rebuild).
I don't see similar behavior when I try 'Reboot radio' vs. 'Rebuild network'.
What I do see is that if you begin with C-8's child table populated with (very) sleepy end devices (like buttons that only check in once an hour or so), they remain in the child table after a 'Radio Reboot'. They really shouldn't if the child table has been 'rebuilt' unless they have checked in since. They do disappear immediately after 'Rebuild Network' and won't reappear unless you either activate them (in which case they appear immediately when you refresh the page), or until their normal check in time expires.
Also a 'Radio Reboot' takes much longer than a 'Rebuild Network', which leads me to believe that this process is doing much more (than what I expect 'Rebuild is doing' with simple API calls to clear the Neighbor and Child tables)
Edit: One similarity I do see is that both 'Rebuild network' and 'Reboot Radio' will allow recovery from the buggy side effect that I've observed with 'Rebuild': either will restore links to C-8's neighbor routers after having rebooted the C-8 hub (any time after having done a 'Rebuild network' previously) causes them to fail.
Post edit edit:
Another difference between the two: 'Reboot radio' does not create whatever C-8 configuration change that 'Rebuild network' does to cause failed links to neighbor routers upon subsequently rebooting the C-8 hub.
This is useful as a workaround to prevent Zigbee failures upon C-8 reboot in the cases where you have used 'Rebuild network', or have had 'Rebuild on every reboot' "ON", rebooted, and now have turned it "OFF". In either of those instances, the next reboot of the C-8 hub will cause links to the hub's neighbor Zigbee repeaters to fail.
Using "Rebuild" again will fix the situation only until the next hub reboot (after which links will fail again, requiring yet another hub reboot with no intervening Rebuild).... or...
Using "Reboot Radio" will get the links working again and won't cause the post hub reboot failure that the Rebuild option does.
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guys advice. please ..... I moved 35 switches from Wemo (which I despised because of reliability issues ) to Zigbee... i am now contemplating a move to Zwave..... a little costly , yes, but I'm not sure if I have a C8 issue (suspect I do) or wifi band congestion or both..
Zwave on C8 is solid , right ?
Costly and a lot of effort to swap out all those switches. Personally I would consider that as an absolute last resort option only.
Not for me, no. I've been having consistent problems with my z-wave network becoming unresponsive. I've been troubleshooting it for weeks and weeks and yet it still happens. I may be a bit closer to resolution but my C7 was reliable and the C8 has not been.
If get to the point where you need to swap them, I suggest Lutron Caseta. They work great and have never let me down. They do require a separate (PRO series) hub though, and they aren't cheap. But through all my C8 woes at least I have been able to turn the lights on and off.
C8 Z-Wave has been fine for me, and I think overall for most people it has been less of an issue than Zigbee on the C8.
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I'm going to need a decision tree from you on this... 
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I'll defer to you @brad5. My diagrams are a bit sketchy, and so far I haven't hooked up a Z-Wave device to my C-8; never made it that far on C-7 either 
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I noticed that the Hue motion I had in my mailbox stopped reporting. I looked at my child/parent table, and it looked funky: very small number of entries in the route table. So, I looked at the log, and noticed that the zigbee radio had turned off for 10 seconds shortly before. Does this rebuild now every automatically at the drop of a hat?
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