Z-Wave needs repair often

I have Z-Wave outlet that I have setup to go off in 180 minutes, but the automation is ify at best. I have to repair the z-wave network at least once a week. I still think that we should be able to schedule a repair sometime in the middle of the night when nothing is going on. It makes Z-wave hard to work with. I have Z-Wave repeaters all over the house and within 20 feet of the outlet. Just not acceptable.

FWIW, 1/2 of my devices are zwave and 75 of those are switches that are also repeaters. I have not had to do a zwave repair in so many months that I have forgotten (I’m thinking maybe April 2016). Every single time I’ve noticed any zwave issue or delay it’s been directly related to a failing device that’s a repeater (for one reason or another). I have replaced 3 failing GE wall switches (4xxxx models) in the last couple months with the new 12xxx model. I’ve also added a few brand new zwave devices without ever doing a repair. Zwave for me has been super rock solid.

Sometimes it’s not always an ST issue, but they’ve certainly caused themselves to always have a finger pointed at them. Also, frequent zwave repairs actually can do more damage than good. I can’t remember the ST staff member who posted that in one of the discussions, but if I come across it I’ll provide a link to it here.

Some SmartThings first line support staff apparently got confused at some point last summer and started telling people that they shouldn’t be doing Z wave repairs. That’s just not correct.

There is an issue where if you are doing a Z wave repair and the hub goes off-line it might make things worse. That has to do with SmartThings platform architecture.

But other than that, zwave repair utility is part of the standard. It doesn’t do anything except update the address tables. Best practices for zwave mean that most controller manufacturers recommend running a Z wave repair at least once a week as part of regular maintenance. Vera, a SmartThings competitor, runs a zwave repair every night. Homeseer, another competitor, doesn’t automatically run it because they don’t want to take the hub off-line for people who are using it as a security system, but they do recommend running it several times a week.

I just want to make sure that people don’t come away with the idea that if you have Z wave devices, regardless of the controller, a repair is a dangerous thing to do. :scream: Based on the standard, a zwave repair should always be a “can’t hurt, might help” utility.

I understand that because of SmartThings’ complex architecture the hub going down in the middle of a repair might cause synchronization issues with the cloud account. But I don’t think SmartThings is making an official recommendation that you don’t do zwave repairs. If that were true, you’d have to completely rebuild the network every time you added new devices. And I’m sure that’s not what they intend.

@duncan @slagle @Tyler

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I agree as I have changed this outlet twice and even switched them around same issue. I was a building automation foreman before I retired and changing out devices is a simple no brainer, but I found it unnecessary in this instance. Every Time I use the power off after a number of minutes on this outlet it works for maybe a week then requires a repair. The problem with that is that the device plugged into the outlet can be over-charged causing battery failure and if I am away I am in trouble. As John has said in the post above yours he has no problems, but I know many people that have had problems.

i have had zwave issues, especially with my kwickset locks dropping off the network

Had to run repair and once remove/repair the lock to get it working

Wish there was a utility on the hub that showed the neighbors the zwave devices are talking to so we could graph out the path to the failing node to see what the issue could be

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It is very annoying and something that has been happening for a long time. There was at one time an app that SmartThings gave to customers that helped with this but they decided against giving it out any longer.