So Im new to SmartThings. Can anyone please try to explain this to me . If Z-Wave is supposed to have a better range than Zigbee, and Z-Wave Plus has even bether than the both of them- then why is that when setting up my system I can have 4 Iris 120 smart plugs(thats a zigbee plug and a zwave repeater) to a Z-wave motion device and the Zigbee work great, all they way, yet the Zwave plus repeater can barely even pair on the 2nd plug. I’ve done the device handler thing, exclusion, deleted location and started over. Nothing seems to help with these Zwave plus repeater range. The repairs keep failing it would even fail on just 1 plug with the Zigbee and Zwave paired I’ve been doing this for over 5 days and cant get it right. Please anyone I may just have to get a zigbee motion detector and 2 zigbee door sensors cuz it’s just not working.
First question: what is the status of the zigbee part of the Iris pocket sockets? That is do they show as “on” in the smartthings mobile app? The reason I ask is because a number of people have reported that if they turn the Iris dual protocol pocket socket off, the device will continue to repeat for Zigbee but will no longer repeat for Z wave. It appears that in that particular device, the Z wave radio is turned off when the current load is turned off while the zigbee radio stays on. That is an unfortunate design flaw if true, but could explain what you were seeing. If you want to use the iris smart plug as a zwave repeater, you have to leave the zigbee portion of it always on.
The second question is when did you last run a Z wave repair and did you get any error messages from it? Again, make sure that the status of all the iris switches is on before you run this utility. It will update the motion sensor neighbor tables so that it knows that it is actually near the smart plug.
. Until you run this repair utility it doesn’t matter how many zwave repeaters you add, The motion sensor won’t know that they are there. ( well, if both devices are zwave plus, it probably will eventually, but that’s a new feature and it’s best not to count on it for now.)
It can take a while for all the address tables to get updated, so you might not see the results of the utility until the next day.
@chadcleven, I have had the same results. Every zigbee device I have added (including the Iris plug) has paired simply and without issue. Z-wave devices, on the other hand, seem like they need to be right next to the hub to pair and have a severely limited range!
With the Iris Smart plug, the zigbee component paired no problem from rooms away. The z-wave part, in the same room only…
There’s a difference between pairing for the first time and passing messages along afterwards.
Zwave devices using “secure pairing” need to be very close to the hub when they are paired for the first time. Then you move them to the your desired location and run a Z wave repair. After that, you should get advantage of their full range to reach the next available repeater.
Zwave classic devices that don’t use secure pairing still need to be very close to the hub when they are paired for the very first time.
Z wave plus devices that don’t use secure pairing should be able to be paired in their desired location provided the nearest repeater to them is also Z wave plus.
If you have zwave classic devices that don’t use secure pairing that are already physically in place, like light switches, and that you now want to pair to SmartThings, you can use a minimote to pair those.
But in all cases, once the zwave device has been joined to the network, you have moved it to its desired location, and you have run a Z wave repair, you should get full range. ( with all the usual caveats about architectural barriers, but those should effect zigbee and zwave equally.)
There is one other limitation: a message can only be relayed over a maximum of four hops. Zigbee can relay 15 hops into the hub and another 15 out for a total of 30. So for a really large building or one where you have to do a lot of hops around architectural barriers like concrete walls, a zigbee installation may be able to cover a lot more ground than zwave because zwave can run out of hops. But that’s unusual for her typical US home.
the Zigbee status on every plug says ON in the mobile app. I unpaired each device and excluded them then deleted them then deleted my hub and then location. Unplugged everything and let stay unplugged for an hour or so. Then I started all over. Registered the hub, location, and published the device handler. Then I first paired the Zigbee parts of each plug, 1, 2, 3 ,and then 4 - no problem- all came up as “outlet”. I checked to make sure the device handler worked - it did - says “Iris Smart Plug” in ide. All the plugs were paired in the same room - roughly 3- 10 feet away from the hub. Then I unplugged them and then paired the Z-wave portion of each plug - 1, 2, 3, 4, with no problem except I had to within, I dunno, 4 feet of the hub. All came up Z-Wave Device. Paired a couple Z-Wave Door Sensors and the Motion Detector. Waited ana bit. I unplugged them all and began putting them in the locations I wanted. Waited longer in hopes that they would all find their buddies and then turned on the Hub. all the Zigbees work - even the farthest one. None of the Z-wave devices - 1 door sensor is even between the hub and a repeater plug - I would say 12 or so feet away. (this sensor has worked over and over until now) ran the network repair a few times always getting failure. I decided to even add 1 more repeater Z-wave/Zigbee Iris Smart Plug close to the hub - still the same the door sensor say open and they arent. All the Zigbee work. and when I try to repair the network I get failure after failure after failure - failure to update mesh and failure to update route. i just did a network repair - and get the same failures. when I look at the device list the last activities with the z-waves are all 2 -4 hours ago while the rest are a few seconds to a couple minutes ago. When I click on the Z-wave repeaters they all say “No data found for device” for the “Data” section and for the “Current State” section, it says “No states found”.
Also:
Door Sensor-
Last Activity At 2016-06-07 7:34 PM PDT
Date Created 2016-06-07 6:47 PM PDT
Last Updated 2016-06-07 6:48 PM PDT
Data No data found for device
Current States
battery: 100 %
contact: open
1st Z-wave repeater -
Last Activity At 2016-06-07 8:34 PM PDT
Date Created 2016-06-07 6:35 PM PDT
Last Updated 2016-06-07 6:36 PM PDT
2nd-
Last Activity At 2016-06-07 6:35 PM PDT
Date Created 2016-06-07 6:35 PM PDT
Last Updated 2016-06-07 6:35 PM PDT
3rd-
Last Activity At 2016-06-07 6:41 PM PDT
Date Created 2016-06-07 6:40 PM PDT
Last Updated 2016-06-07 6:41 PM PDT
another Door Sensor-
Last Activity At 2016-06-07 6:49 PM PDT
Date Created 2016-06-07 6:48 PM PDT
Last Updated 2016-06-07 6:49 PM PDT
Data No data found for device
Current States
battery: 100 %
4th-
Last Activity At 2016-06-07 6:46 PM PDT
Date Created 2016-06-07 6:45 PM PDT
Last Updated 2016-06-07 6:46 PM PDT
Motion Detector-
Last Activity At 2016-06-07 6:52 PM PDT
Date Created 2016-06-07 6:52 PM PDT
Last Updated 2016-06-07 6:52 PM PDT
Data No data found for device
Current States
motion: active
Then the additional Z-wave Repeater Iris Smart Plug that I Added closer to the hub before # 1
Last Activity At 2016-06-07 8:40 PM PDT
Date Created 2016-06-07 8:39 PM PDT
Last Updated 2016-06-07 8:40 PM PDT
Data No data found for device
Current States No states found
Did you run a zwave repair utility after you had all the devices in their desired locations? If so, did it have any errors?
( Zwave devices don’t know who their true neighbors are when you physically move them to a new location, so you have to run the repair utility to get each device to update its individual neighbor Table. You may not see the results of this until the next day. )
Also, Z wave devices will not “find their buddies” while the hub is off. So you pair device next to the hub, that’s fine, that’s what we call “bench Pairing.” Then you move the device to its desired location. Then you run a Z wave repair utility to update the neighbor table for the new location.
( forgive me if you did say you already did the repair. I rely on text to speech and I couldn’t quite follow all of your post.)
ZIGBEE HEAL VS ZWAVE REPAIR
It sounds like you may have gotten confused about a zigbee heal vs a zwave repair.
To get Zigbee devices to update their individual neighbor tables, you take the hub off of power for at least 15 minutes while the end devices are on power. This step does not make the Zigbee devices update their neighbor tables – – it just makes them panic because the Coordinator is off-line. Then when the hub comes back online, the individual zigbee devices automatically all start updating their own neighbor tables, really because they think the entire network has moved. This is called a “network heal.”
Zwave classic devices, to be honest, don’t care if the hub goes missing for a while. They never change their neighbor tables until the hub specifically tells them to do so using the “Z wave repair utility.” This changed somewhat with zwave plus and there will be some automatic rebuilding that goes on, but you never know how long that’s going to take and it’s more for ongoing maintenance, not a situation like a new device being added.
Thanks for your help and insight. The device is the Iris Smart Plug 3210-L . I did run a Zwave repair when I turned the hub back on and there were errors right away. When I did add an additional plug close to the hub, that particular one never threw errors. So I’ll try one by one. But I think I may wait for 24 hours to see what happens and if it ever resolves cause I hear it can take a awhile… we will see what happend but I may just get a zigbee door sensor and motion detector and be done with it. It just seems like the easiest thing to do.
According to support ‘there are known issues with zwave devices that they are working on’. There was no further explanation nor ETA, go figure. However, based on my personal experience, I have seen strange issues with my zwave mesh in the past few days. The most frustrating is this kind of empty statements from support that make troubleshooting extremely difficult. Nonetheless I was unable to successfully run a zwave repair in 3 days. Every time I try, I get an error that zwave radio is unresponsive. Another uninformative message, as it doesn’t point me to one specific device. Had contacted support by chat and email and no resolution so far.
So, good news and bad. @JDRoberts , @slagle would like your opinion on this. Support identified two zwave ghosts on my mesh, but they couldn’t remove them, which means that I won’t be able to run repairs anymore. After reboot, my mesh seems functional, but I want to add a few more switches. I was told that devices should route optimally without running a repair. Any thoughts, advice? @duncan
Did you try the trick of adding a virtual device with the same network ID as the ghost and then deleting that?
I’m probably the wrong person to ask in some ways, because my standards are more commercial standards. I wouldn’t operate a network that I couldn’t run repairs on. But that doesn’t mean that’s the right answer for a residential network with only a few devices.
What a nightmare this was!!! @duncan the progress made on the zwave maintenance is outstanding!
Long story short, the forced removal of two devices created two ghosts. Support was unsuccessful at deleting the ghosts. Luckily, the devices were still operational so, I attempted to reinclude them. One was included fine and got a new ID. The other one failed to include BUT for some reason the missing info was re-added, so support was able to delete the device. Now the remains of the ghost device, which got the new ID, were automatically removed by the system (maybe you know how, because neither support nor I did anything) - see the screenshot below.
Bottom line is, that I got rid off the err 101 and was able to successfully complete the repair. Huh, that was a close call…
OK, so it’s likely your highest zwave device is ID “4F” or less.
When you name your virtual devices and you give them a network ID, how do you select the network IDs? Do you have a pattern? In particular, do you use two character IDs for them? Or more?
I used to set mine alphanumeric, starting with VS but when I started setting virtual devices again, I looked at something that is distinct enough from zigbee and zwave and settled for 10 digits.
And now that you “made” me refresh my inventory to count my zwave devices, I noticed that my t-stats (plain ol’ Z-Wave Thermostat DTH) are no longer local. I wish they keep us informed when they take devices off or add new ones on the hub. @slagle , @jody.albritton how can we stay informed on these things? Or what we don’t know doesn’t hurt?
Update:
Add to the non local list another DTH that was pulled recently. The Smartsense Garage Door Multi. Why?
