I have about 20 of these working as Zigbee repeaters and for various automations around my house. I came from Vera to Smartthings and didn’t pair the Zwave repeater part when I switched over due to all the information on the web about the Zwave part being unreliable and having to have the switch on for the repeating function to even work. I ended up buying a bunch of Ge Zwave plugs for the Zwave mesh in my house. All around my house I have a 3210-L and a GE Zwave plug in the same outlet. My mesh is rock solid and I want to keep it that way. In reading other posts, I see a bunch of people using these as Zwave repeaters. I’m now thinking that the problem I was having with my Zwave mesh at that time was Vera and not the plugs themselves. If I could pair the Zwave repeater part and it would work reliably then I could remove the 20 Ge Zwave plugs I have and reduce the number of devices I have being that I’m approaching the 200-device limit. This would also make the wife happy as she doesn’t like me using all the outlets and she really doesn’t like the way it looks either.
Is anyone using these in a medium to large setup and are they creating a solid Zwave mesh for you? Im guessing from reading other posts that I could install the Zwave Thing Mc driver and then just press the power button 8 times real fast and they would pair as Zwave thing and work as a repeater or do I have to reset them to factory and repair both the Zigbee plug and the Zwave repeater? Any comments or help would be appreciated.
If your mesh is solid without them I wouldn’t bother.
Yes they work as great ZWave repeaters when they work.
They SUCK (and I caamnt stress this hard enough) when they fail. I’ve owned 6-7? Of these over time (they used to form the backbone of my initial install many years ago) and every one of them eventually failed in a similar fashion.
The story for each of these devices for me then ended like:
Weird stuff then NOTHING on the zwave network.
Dig in and find ‘something up’ around that device, unplug it to find ZWave returns.
Plug it back in to find the network jacked up again and the device either stopped forwarding messages or is flooding the network and the network runs better without it.
So if you have a weak spot in your mesh try ONE and see if it helps. It probably will. But if your mesh is already strong you’re just introducing potential troubshooting of a very old device.
Finally pairing the ZWave side of the device counts as a separate ZWave device so you’ll not save yourself anything and lose a powered outlet when you swap it for the GE.
Instead id be looking at your options for swapping out the 3210 entirely and solving for the subsequent impact on your zigbee mesh.
@nathancu I don’t think that I will replace them due to the fact that I have never had one fail on the Zigbee switch part of the device and I don’t have any Zigbee mesh issues. Thank you, I didn’t think about the device count being the same! I originally purchased them when Lowes went out of business and got them for pennies on the dollar. I had a ton of issues with the Zwave repeater part but thought that might be a Vera issue and I had never tried again when I switched to Smartthings.
Do you know of another device with dual Zwave Zigbee repeaters? That would make me trash them and replace with a new device.
Nope. It’s a unicorn. (the only one I’ve ever heard of. JD may know otherwise)
What I settled on for my personal install…
Zigbee in the outlet, ZWave on the wall.
I used ZWave for all my wall switches. Most are GE/Jascos except for my inovelli and Zooz scene controllers. I then used the GE Jasco duplex outlet in all the wall outlets I replaced. On average that’s at least two powered devices for each mesh in each room. If you could see this particular portion of the RF spectrum you could see it from space! We might be interfering with JWST at this point…
most multi protocol hubs can act as a repeater for each mesh protocol they support, but yeah, other than that I’ve never seen a standalone device quite like that one.
Thank you both. @nathancu I have added a few outlets and switches but to be honest im lazy and the pocket sockets are a lot easier lol. @JDRoberts to bad your not able to add multiple Smartthings hubs or I would o that and hide them around my house.
