My 3rd hub in my mesh is in a separate building. Wifi works fine but i can’t get my smoke detector to connect. Bring it to my main house and it connects??
Is said smoke detector wifi, zwave, zigbee? model numbers help.
If zwave/zigbee, the “mesh” feature of additional hubs extends WiFi but would still need to be in range of zwave/zigbee of the primary hub. JDRoberts explained some details here.
2 Likes
Its a first alert which is z wave. So i need another primary hub in my garage i guess (ugh)
How far is the garage from the main Zwave hub?
You may be able to use powered Zwave devices or repeaters to “bridge the gap.”. Zwave is 900mhz so it travels pretty well thru things, although garages can be trough as they usually have big metal doors with giant metal objects inside.
90 yards but its a metal pole building lol. I think i have an old hub i could use down there. All this time i was thinking each hub had the zwave.
You’ve been helpful thank you
1 Like
It would help to know the model numbers of your hubs.
-
Each Aeotec/SmartThings hub has zwave. Each creates its own Z wave network, and they are not meshed.
-
The SmartThings station does not have zwave.
-
Each SmartThings WiFi with Plume hub has zwave. If you have set one up as the primary and the other as subhubs, they will share the same Z wave network, but you don’t get any more range than you would from any other Z wave device like a smart plug in the same physical location. In other words, the fact that they are meshing the Wi-Fi doesn’t help you with zwave range.
-
if you have the now discontinued, Samsung connect home, a different Wi-Fi mesh model, I believe the sub hubs don’t activate zwave. (at least they didn’t when they were first released.)
So, as always, the first role of home automation applies: “the model number matters.“
1 Like