Hub & Solar City Gateway

I have been using the Smarthings Home Monitoring system for awhile now and have not had any particular issues until recently. I had Solar City install their solar system on my house and was finally able to power up the unit. Part of the installation includes a gateway monitor between my home network and the power unit mounted on the outside of my house. As it turns out, the unit uses the ZigBee protocol to communicate between the gateway and the physical unit. It appears that none of my Multi Function Sensors are recognizing any change in status. That is, If I open the back door, the app still reports the door as being closed. Some devices appear to still be working such as the motion sensors, smoke detectors and wall power units. Has anyone run into this issue and, if so, how did you correct it. I suspect there is a protocol conflict between the solar gateway and the smarthings hub.

I have solar city at my house and have not had any interference problems with the Smartthings hub.

There is a “protocol conflict” in the sense that the two systems use different zigbee profiles and so cannot talk to each other, but that doesn’t have anything to do with whether or not there is interference.

For interference, the best thing is to make sure that the SmartThings hub and the solar city gateway are at least 3 m apart. Because zigbee signal spreads, you are most likely to get interference right at the hub. If you can just give it some space to spread, the interference may not be as much of a problem.

Also make sure the smartthings hub is at least 3 m from your Wi-Fi router. Strong Wi-Fi can drown out zigbee signals.

I know this is a very frustrating problem, and field techs normally just do some trial and error location work, physically moving the devices around to try and avoid blank spots.

Good luck, let us know what happens.

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Thank you for taking the time to respond. The hub is in a completely different room than the access point and the solar city gateway. I’m going to try to power off the solar city gateway to see if the sensors begin to start working again. If they do, then I’ll have to play around with the location of the hub to see if it can be corrected. Otherwise, solar city is going to have to do something to correct this as the home monitoring is more important to me than the solar city gateway. Thanks again for you help and advice. I really appreciate it.

Remember that these signals travel through walls and are Omnidirectional (360°). So, for example, if the gateway is on an Exterior wall and the SmartThings hub is 6 feet away on the other side of that wall there could potentially be interference.

Anyway, let us know what you find out.

Well, I was finally able to figure out what was going on. Both my front and back door sensors were no longer working. I tried some of my window sensors and they all worked. Next I tried to re-pair my back door sensor and discovered that the sensor was totally unresponsive. That meant one of two things: Either the battery was dead or the sensor had failed. I then purchased a couple of new batteries and tried them and both sensor began to work again.

The issue I have now is that both sensors indicated 66% of battery life available and gave me absolutely no indication or warning to replace the batteries. Not much of proactive approach to the battery life.

Anyway, everything is now working properly again. Thanks for you help, I really appreciate it.

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