Classic App z-wave repair questions

Per title, I’m unclear on a couple of things about the repair feature:

  1. Once started, can you leave the app and do other things on your phone, or do you have to wait until it finishes before doing anything else?
  2. While the repair is running, do you have access to your devices, for instance, through a smart speaker like the Echo or Google Home?
  3. How long should one reasonably expect the repair to take?
  4. How often should one do the repair?
  5. Should you always see the “repair started” and “repair finished” messages?

Source of my questions:
I’ve tried to run the repair a bunch of times over having smartthings for the last year. Most of the time it seems like it hangs - just sits there spinning forever and eventually I get tired of waiting for it to complete and leave the app. Then when I come back there aren’t any messages I jut have to restart the repair. It would be helpful to know what to expect and what I need to do to actually get the repair to finish. Also be good to know if it really does anything. I’ve tried it when my devices aren’t responding well in the hopes that might fix the problem and it has not really made a difference. But it would make sense that you might want to do this after adding new devices to get the most efficient mesh.

Thanks in advance!

Joe

  1. Once it’s started, it started. You can leave the app. ( you can also start it from the web browser interface to your account if you prefer.)

  2. While it’s running, do not try to do anything with your Z wave devices, through Echo or anything else. But you can use devices of other protocols like Wi-Fi devices or zigbee devices.

  3. How long the repair takes depends on a bunch of different factors, but 15 minutes is pretty typical if you have 20 or fewer Z wave devices. If you have 100 zwave devices it might take an hour. If you have over 100 zwave devices it’s unpredictable because the routing get so complicated. Vera and other competitor hubs generally run it overnight.

  4. How often is a complicated question. Most Z wave only platforms will recommend that you do it at least once a week, and many, like vera, schedule it for every night. But once you get into multiple protocol platforms there tends to be a little push back and say well, you should only run it when you’ve added new devices to your network or when you see a problem. That’s because it takes resources away from the hub.

SmartThings support will tell people not to run it if you have more than 50 devices which is incredibly annoying to those of us with a network engineering background. But I think it has to do with their need to sync it with the cloud account and the complexity of that process. It’s certainly not best practices for an ordinary Z wave controller.

So depending on who you ask on what day you might get any answer from run it every night to never run it at all. :scream:.

  1. It’s quite common not to see a “repair finished“ message, that’s a smartthings issue.
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