I’ve had a v2 hub for quite a while & its been good for the pile of switches in the house & even the chicken coop relatively near the house. But unsurprisingly it never worked well for my metal walled shop 150-200’ from the house. I put an outlet in a plastic weatherproof box outside the shop & it was successfully working as a repeater for a while, but it stopped a little while back.
I picked up a 3 pack of the WV525 SmartThings WiFi hubs to hopefully remedy the issue but haven’t had any luck sorting out the shop. I got all the z-wave devices at the house deleted & moved over just fine. But when I move one of the WiFi hubs in the WiFi mesh up to my shop things are a no go.
I have Ethernet & Internet inside the shop, but it’s a different network than my house network. If I plug the additional hub in out there it broadcasts & provides WiFi connectivity as (I mostly) expected. But again, I’m not able to exclude or add any of the switches in there to the new network. I was guessing the hubs needed to be on the same LAN or WiFi mesh to act as Z-wave gateways, so I tried moving it outside.
The hub gets ok signal to the main hub in the house when sitting outside the shop doing the WiFi mesh thing, but I’m still unable to get any switches inside to exclude or join the new network. Even when they are 10’ away with almost line of sight though an open door. It was always a little flaky (VERY flaky without the outlet acting as a Z-wave relay), but my v2 hub could cover that 150’ or so. The new hubs seem to either only use the main hub & not the additional WiFi meshed ones for Z-wave or have something else funky going on.
Am I missing something on the SmartThings WiFi hubs? I was under the impression that all of them that were provisioned into the same WiFi & SmartThings mesh would each act as a gateway.
Do I just need to wipe my old v2 hub, plug it into my shop Ethernet & join all the switches to it? There use to be some pretty big limitations on having 2 different hubs & not being able to run automation between them. Are those limitations still around after the move away from the SmartThings classic app? I know you can only add a Z-wave device to 1 hub.
I’d really like to be able to turn on the lights outside the shop from the switch on my deck again & have my air compressor (110v light switch running a 5hp rated 220v relay) automatically turn off when I turn off the shop lights, again.