I have posted a few times in the Facebook group and have been advised to post in here as the help there seems to be running to a halt other than to fit external ariels to my hub which I am cautious about doing.
I have a C7 hub, about around 20 zwave devices, 35 ZigBee and interfaces to Alexa and Ring for my alarm. I have three wall-mounted tablets showing Hubitat Dashboards.
Everything was working fine until I built a new garage and tried to extend functionality to it. This included one ZigBee smartthings plug-in switch which works perfectly. Zwave wise MCO two way switch, a Heltun Siren a fibaro movement sensor and a Fibaro Smart implant.
The garage is around 1.5m (4ft) from my house. Hubitat is mounted to a wall with the power and network plugs at the bottom. probably around 8-10m from the garage.
Zwave commands sent to the garage have been a lottery at best. Reboot the hub, re-join everything and it would mostly work for maybe 12 hours then stop responding. As advised, I added a pair of Ring beaming repeaters (v2) to hubitat. One positioned in the room next to the Garage, the other inside the garage and rejoined all garage devices. There was still a mishmash or routing going on but in general, everything settled through one or the other repeaters for about a week.
I then noticed my electric door had stopped working. This was controlled by the fibaro smart implant. After four attempts to close the door, it eventually did. Four attempts in the system log, only one in the zwave log for the device. I also noticed this device had changed its routing to be direct to the hub and is now unreliable again.
What advice can you give me around this, please? I basically want to be able to trust the devices on the zwave network.
When you say re-join are you actually excluding the device and pairing it again? Why are you doing that? If you just power stuff off and back on it should reconnect without have to pair again.
Besides that, my best advise it to wait for the 2.3.1 release that is in beta right now because there is a ZWave update which seems to resolve a lot of routing problems on the C7 for the test group.
Do you have ethernet connectivity to the garage? You could put a second hub in the garage, pair these devices to the hub in the garage, and then use hub mesh to connect the two.
I'm confident a second hub would resolve the issue as long as you had solid network connectivity (hard wired). But I would also look at it as a last resort. As for expense, yeah, you'd incur the cost of a new hub and whatever it took to get ethernet to the garage. The hub itself is probably the cost of a couple beaming repeaters. Can't speak to the cost of running ethernet... and it does add to the complexity of the installation.
Would be curious to have others weigh in... @aaiyar and @rlithgow1 are both pretty insightful on issues like this.
I feel like just having one repeater in the house near the garage in theory should have solved it. My garage is attached, but I have a tilt sensor and ZEN16 out there which are around 30-40ft from the hub with multiple walls in the way. There are also two mains powered zwave switches just inside the house the garage stuff can repeat off of. Everything works fine.
This is my thoughts of possibilities for the continued problem
Building construction is prohibiting zwave radio penetration (lots of metal in walls?, or solid block?)
Constant tinkering trying to resolve it, is making it worse, removing and re-joining devices, etc...
I still also think the new zwave radio version in beta will help, possibly not fix 100% depending on other factors, but it will help. May just need to let it settle as well, so the mesh can work itself out a little. May take 24-48 hours. I can see in the topology that the garage devices are all friends, and friends with the repeaters, but not much else. If the garage devices route through either repeater it looks like they should have a clear route to the hub.
Yeah, I agree,,, I also wonder if too much tinkering (and not letting things settle in) is an issue since the distance etc should all otherwise be fine.
My Zen 17, a Zooz 71 sw, and an Aeotec RE7 are all out in my detached garage (plus several zigbee devices), and they all work fine -- garage is ~50' from house and house has a stucco exterior.
I've learned patience is key with z-wave mesh, and also don't sweat the small stuff.... Like if device is connected at 9.6, but otherwise works fine, then let it ride -- trying to make that better often just has the opposite effect or drives you crazy trying!
I'm looking forward to the new release. The bit I don't understand is these repeaters are in the right places but they don't seem to be used, instead, zwave chooses to ignore them and connect direct to the hub or via another route that does not make sense. Such as A via B to the hub, the B via A to the hub.
I'm not tinkering, I rejoined the fibaro implant and it was joined by one of the repeaters. It worked perfectly for about a week, untouched. Then one day it failed to operate again and when I checked the console I found it had changed the route to direct all by itself.
The zwave routing seems to be the problem here, to be honest. It defies logic how it routes things, there are plenty of devices that could go between but instead sometimes routes via the opposite side of the house. I know that zwave has no concept of the physical world, only signal strength but it does seem to need attention. Hopefully, the upgrade will fix it.
Not 'tinkering' I left everything for a week working fine, then suddenly it changed route and stopped working again. I was very hopeful that it was fixed.
One other thing to check - do you have any battery operated Z-Wave devices like locks? Make sure the battery levels are all good. There have been some issues reported where sending commands to a FLiRS (Frequently Listening Routing Slaves) device that is not responding can cause the mesh to get bogged down.
I'm not sure if this is specifically related to the new Radio firmware in the Beta though but still might be worth investigating.
FLiRS devices can include locks, thermostats, window shade controllers, motion sensors etc.
Yeah some devices report battery a high percent for most of the charge then decline rapidly seemingly at the last minute. Ah well - It was a thought..
With a FLiRS device you might not know it's offline particularly if its a device that doesn't get used regularly. Not saying that's the case here though.
I can't get past the crazy routing that I keep getting. It can't be right that something routes of a device that's twice the distance between it and the hub or one device does a reverse of the other.
