ZWave Mesh and Repeaters

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I know, there are gazillions of ZWave/Repeaters related threads but
neither one has a clear answer to my question(s).

My ZWave Mesh is pretty solid (I think).
All Devices are ZWave Plus (mix of 500 & 700 series).
There are many line powered Devices and these must be a Repeaters.
There are no Ghosts.
Everything looks OK except for the Locks.

My original Lock was August Pro. I had it for about 2 years.
Lock itself is very nice and worked very well with native August app.
However ZWave communication never was reliable no matter what I was trying.

Recently I replaced August Pro Lock with Ultrateq ZWave Lock.
So far this one has very reliable ZWave communication but it is to...o slow.
Sometime it is flying but in many cases it may take up to 10 sec for
command to go through and about the same time for the reporting status.

Now my main question is about dedicated Repeaters.
A year+ ago I installed Aeotec-7 repeater.
After few days only one Device was using this repeater and after
another few days this Device forgot about the repeater.
During a year+ neither of my ZWave devices was using this repeater.
So I removed from the mesh because it was absolutely useless.

Before replacing my lock I installed Ring V2 Repeater because this
one has a lot of very good feedbacks.
However the story repeats itself.
Again one device was using it for couples days and now after 2+
weeks the repeater is not used.

The new Lock originally connected directly to the hub and communication
was very fast and reliable. So I know, the communication could be very fast.
After few days the Lock decided to use one nearby switch as a repeater and
as a result the communication became very slow but still reliable.

Is anyone (@bcopeland) has an idea how to get communication with a lock fast?
As of today I am very skeptical regarding these dedicated repeaters.
I have my old C-5 hub and even still unboxed C-7.
Should I try this spare C-7 to dedicate to the Lock and move all lock
related automation to this new hub?
The problem to try this - I don't have wired lan close to the lock and
I don't like this C-7 to be on WiFi.

2

I don't have anything concrete to add, just anecdotal... I added several Aeotec RE7s a long time ago in strategic places I figured they'd be most useful. They went "unused" for a long time -- I thought of pulling them out, but figured why not just leave them be.

One day out of the blue a while ago, they all just started picking stuff up -- now they're all repeating at least one thing and are absolutely carrying the water as the main backbone of my mesh.

I don't recall that timing being commensurate with a hub or device f/w update, but perhaps so... Anyway, I am just grateful they finally kicked in.

Bottomline - ZW routing is a real mystery!... Plan and build good mesh placement with the physical devices, then be patient. very patient lol.

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Repeaters are a mystery wrapped in an enigma...some work great for other users do zilch for yourself, and vice-versa. It can take several weeks for a new repeater to "settle in" so you may want to let the Ring repeater run for a little longer before giving up on it. Unfortunately in my case when I tried the Ring repeater nothing ever used it. Tried Aeotec v6 and v7 repeaters, and they haven't been very helpful either. The only repeater that has consistently repeated for me on two different C7s is the Hank Plug (not made any more AFAIK) which is not even a dedicated repeater.

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