I’m hoping someone can help explain to me the reasoning as to why most device’s instruction manuals say to pair the device close to the hub, then move it to its permanent location.
Based off of my understanding on how zigbee and zwave mesh networks work (my understanding mostly based off of this SmartThings blog https://blog.smartthings.com/iot101/a-guide-to-wireless-range-repeaters/) doing so is counter productive and can cause problems.
When a device joins the mesh network, it finds the strongest signal and utilizes it as a parent. That devices then locks onto that parent and always uses it, even if there is a stronger signal coming from another node. By pairing it right next to the hub, it’ll almost always lock onto the hub as its parent. Then, if you move it away and put it in its permanent location, you very likely will have a stronger, more reliable signal from another repeater, but it’ll never use it, it’ll stay locked to the hub. I’d think this would cause issues and potentially sporadic device unavailability.
I know the quick fix for this with zwave devices is to preform a zwave repair, but zigbee doesn’t have have same option. With zigbee you have to completely take down the entire zwave network for several minutes in order to force the devices to reestablish themselves with new parent nodes. This isn’t even really documented anywhere.
Any insight would be appreciated.