Greetings. I have a ST Hub and several Schlage Sense Locks that I am installing throughout the house. Two of the locks have been successfully installed and have no problems opening and closing. A third location is giving me problems. After not being able to install it from the permanent location (there are 2-3 stone walls in between it and the hub) with fresh batteries, I moved the lock closer to the hub and was able to register it. I started to move back towards the permanent location and it started to lose connectivity again (I assume because of the walls).
Question: When I’m at the permanent location, it has line of site to one of the first 2 locks, 25 ft away, that are working fine. Shouldn’t it be communicating with that device as part of the z-wave mesh network to reach the hub?
Lightbulbs repeat for each other but generally not for other devices with the exception of zwave lightbulbs which generally do repeat for other devices.
Smoke detectors and other alarm devices generally do not repeat even if they are hardwired. That’s to make sure they don’t miss one of their own detection events like being busy repeating a message for a lightbulb someplace .
Battery-operated devices do not repeat.
Other mains-powered devices generally do repeat, with the understanding that zigbee only repeats for Zigbee and zwave only repeats for Zwave.
However, there’s a separate issue that may be involved since you mentioned a lock. Zwave Locks use a special repeating method called “beaming”. Because it’s so important that a lock receive its messages in a timely fashion, the beaming repeaters will hold the message and try again, something which is not done in the same way for other types of devices.
For this reason, you want to make sure that the mains-powered zwave device which is physically closest to the lock is capable of supporting beaming. Some light switches are, some light switches or not. So that just a feature that you need to look for.
Schlage “connect” model locks are either zwave or Zigbee.
The Schlage “sense” model is a new Bluetooth lock for use with HomeKit .
As I mentioned above, though, none of these repeat for any protocol, because battery operated devices generally don’t as it would use up the batteries too fast.