I have a question about the way that Zwave works. I understand it’s supposed to be a mesh network where neighboring nodes are able to pass traffic to one another. I also know that wired nodes are typically repeaters and wireless nodes are not for obvious reasons.
From what I’ve seen, each device has a table of neighbors it refers to when receiving or passing traffic, so my assumption is that the wireless devices have the same table?
My question is the following. Are wireless devices woken up during a Zwave network repair and provided with new routing tables? My old controller (Zipato) did not wake up wireless devices.
The reason I ask, is that if they aren’t woken up during a repair, why does every manufacturer tell you to pair the device right next to the hub? If I’m going to put it at the other end of the house, how will it ever get its updated list of neighbors since it doesn’t wake up during a repair?
Thanks!
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Because they want to prove you that their device works. They don’t want to troubleshoot a weak mesh and the reasons why the new device cannot reach your controller from your neighbor’s kitchen. LOL
Repair “uses 100% of the Z-Wave bandwidth during the process and every node will wake up every FliR node (door locks) at least once which will drain the batteries of the FLiR node. Generally only heal when nodes have been added or removed or if there seems to be a problem in the network.”
It’s not that complicated. 
Most battery powered Z wave devices are not FLIRS. Some of them will be awake, some of them will be asleep. That’s what error messages are for. 
you’ll be able to tell from reviewing the error messages at the end of the repair which devices did not update. Then you can decide for yourself whether you think that’s important or not. A lot of field techs Will run a Z wave repair three times in a row about 15 minutes apart, but that’s not strictly necessary. If you haven’t moved the device since your last repair and you haven’t added a new repeater near it, it doesn’t really matter.
Even better news is that once you get to z wave plus, the tables will update themselves slowly over time through what are called “explorer frames.” This process happens automatically. So eventually, all your Z wave plus devices will update themselves anyway.
Systems like Vera which run a zwave repair utility every night as part of regular maintenance figure that by the end of the week they’ll have gotten all of the old devices and the newer Z wave plus ones will keep themselves up to date.
For most other platforms, if you have Z wave plus Devices, you don’t worry about it. If you also have some older devices, it’s up to you, the human, to decide what to do about it. The system will tell you through the error messages which devices got skipped and then you can decide whether to run another repair or not.
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