Presence Sensor and Zigbee Repeaters

Devices & Integrations Connected Things
1

I have a SmartThings Zigbee presence sensor on my dog (mostly for fun), and in some parts of the house, she’s too far from the hub, so I’ll get spurious messages about her leaving the house. So I thought I might try a Zigbee repeater, like the SmartThings Zigbee outlet. Then I read:

“For ZigBee devices, things have to get worse before they get better. The device has to completely lose communication with its parent (the Hub in the example above) for it to look for a new, better parent. … In about 5-10 minutes, the device will give up trying to talk to its missing parent and find a new one–the repeater we added half-way between the device and the Hub!”

So my question is: will a Zigbee repeater actually help me? Or, when my dog moves from a part of the house served by the hub to a part of the house served by the repeater, will there be a 5-10 minute period where it’s still trying to talk to the wrong device and I therefore get spurious “left home” messages anyway?

2

Yes, it will help. It’s just that there’s no way to manually initiate a zigbee network repair like you can with zwave. Instead, add the device and turn off your hub for 15 mins. The mesh network will rebuild itself after that.