A Guide to Wireless Range & Repeaters

[JDRoberts]

Adding to this, a note about lightbulbs and doorlocks…

1. Most zigbee light link devices, including Phillips Hue bulbs, GE link bulbs, Cree Connectedly bulbs, and Yee Sunflower bulbs can only act as repeaters for other ZLL devices on their own mini network. Not for other zigbee devices. (edited to add: @Savij reports below that the Osram Lightify bulbs do act as ZHA repeaters also.)

2. Many zwave lightbulbs, although not all, will in contrast act as repeaters for any nonbeaming zwave devices as long as they are powered on. This can be useful if you need a ceiling mount zwave repeater.

3. zwave doorlocks use a special protocol called “beaming.” Only other zwave devices that support beaming can pass messages on to them. To determine if a device supports beaming, see its official “conformance statement” on the Z-wave Alliance website.

The following topic explains more about exactly which devices can repeat for which. This is a clickable link.

FAQ: Is this device a repeater?

you’ve read a little about range and message repeating, and you suspect that the reason why there’s this huge lag in a lightswitch going on in your bedroom, or why you’re having problems with your lock, is because your Devices are out of range. Adding a second hub won’t help under the current architecture. Whether it’s v1 or v2. To extend the mesh, you need more devices capable of “repeating” the specific messages you want repeated. That’s so they can do their little relay thing of passing the message along like a old-fashioned horseback messengers. Ride till your horse gets tired (end of your range) pass the message onto the next guy who then rides as far as he can and so on until the message reaches its destination. which devices don’t repeat Most battery-powered devices do not rep…