I currently have 23 Z-wave plus switches and dimmers. No Z-wave classic, no battery powered devices.
I’m back to Z-wave repair throwing up “could not assign new route” errors on 18 devices.
Now that we can see the mesh routes in the IDE, I’m seeing some really stupid looking stuff.
I’m thinking about going thru my devices, starting near the hub, and replacing each device with itself. Not doing any physical device change but removing and re-adding in a way that won’t require rebuilding scenes and automations.
Any thoughts on this? What would the steps be for each device?
So if I pull the air gap switch or pop the breaker…?
One particular weird route for a GE switch that is showing slow responses goes to a Leviton switch at the far end of the house, then to a second Leviton in the same 2-gang box with the first, then to the hub.
I’ve got routes that go to the kitchen sink dimmer and then to the hub. That makes sense because the kitchen sink dimmer is closest to the hub.
But the kitchen sink dimmer’s route goes to a switch that is the farthest from the hub, then back to one near the hub, then to the hub.
And there are multiple cases of routes going thru multiple switches in the same multi-gang box and then to the hub.
My understanding is that trick doesn’t work anymore because they changed what happens in a replace on the smartthings platform and you will not be able to preserve the automations even if you are replacing the device with itself. If someone knows otherwise, hopefully they will post.
JD, just thinking through this out loud… believe he should be able to pull the air gap on the devices that are acting as unnecessary intermediate repeaters then pop a ZWave repair. Correct?
The switch with the bad neighbor table will see the broadcast, attempt to update itself and wont find those devices and hopefully pick a new better route? Then turnnthose devices back on and…
Or if it doesnt see the broadcast because the repeater is missing and the route is busted and doesn’t update THEN he could attempt a replace because the device is now offline… I haven’t seen different repace function as you described but then again I haven’t attempted to since December.
Does any of it make any more sense if you reverse the intermediate hops? ST staff commented the Z-Wave routing as first released was back to front and was awaiting an update. I haven’t seen any comment about that update having happened yet.
Sorry, I should have mentioned that I had seen the post about the routes being shown backwards. I’ve given them in the corrected order in my descriptions above.
Honestly, I don’t know how they are doing the replace at this point. I know the change was that they were excluding the device as part of the process which they didn’t used to do. Which meant the device was getting reset and all the automations were having to be cleared before you could run it. Whether it will now let you run it just because the device is off-line, I don’t know.
As far as “stupid stuff” in the routing, that’s the standard Z wave algorithm, and I would tend to trust it. It’s not about what looks sensible to a human. It’s what works well for the network when the routes are discovered. There’s some balancing that goes on, there are issues of signal strength, there’s a certain amount of randomness just to provide more balancing. It may look like somebody dropped a box of ping pong balls from the ceiling, but that’s OK as long as the QOS is high enough. So unless you are having specific problems with an individual device, I wouldn’t worry about whatever mesh Zwave is setting up for itself. It’s not supposed to look like a human did it.
Thanks, JD. I was kinda thinking that I’m stressing out over nothing.
If it wasn’t for all the errors I get when trying a Z-wave Repair, I would ignore the routes entirely. I’ve got half a dozen additional Z-wave Plus switches in the cabinet waiting to be installed. Don’t like having repair errors when I’m about to add to the mesh.
Everything is working. Maybe I should stop worrying…
Haven’t done a Z-Wave repair in a couple of years. My routes are all over the place and if I spent a lot of time in the IDE looking at the logs, I’d probably would have thrown the ST Hub out of the window by now.
I have a lot of devices! ST has been running really good lately. If it ain’t broke…
