I have a detached garage that is 50 feet from my hub. I have a z-wave+ outlet on the outside of my building to be a bridge from the hub to the garage. This device does not work well well because of the bad route. The problem that I have is that the route for the outlet goes to a light on the far side of the house, to a pouch light, then back to another light on the far side of the house, then to the hub. I have tried to do a z-wave repair 5 times, with no luck. I have ask support if they can change the route, they say no. Is there any way to manually update the route? Will excluding and repairing the outlet give it a better route. Any help would be appreciated, as support is no help.
Zwave is a mesh protocol and the network chooses its own routes. There is no way to manually create a route, nor should you, because you don’t have the same information that the network algorithms do. There’s a lot that can go into it, including local interference and balancing traffic loads.
That said, if you really really really want to control which devices will be used for a specific route, you can remove all your other repeater devices from power (don’t just turn them off, unplug them or if necessary through the circuit breaker) and then run a Z wave repair. The remaining devices will route through each other.
However, You would have to do this every time you run a zwave repair. Run it once first to create your normal routes, then take all the stuff you don’t want included off power, then run it a second time to force the routes for the remaining devices.
Even then, if these are Z wave plus devices the route may eventually change again over time because of explorer frames.
It wouldn’t hurt to exclude and re-include the outlet and see what happens. But in general unless you are seeing performance issues it’s best to just let the network choose its own routing. That’s what mesh is designed for.
So first - if you’re getting the ‘route’ information from the IDE, realize that unlike Zigbee, ZWave devices keep a complete map of all neighbors, so it is ONLY Showing one POSSIBLE route and the last route reported to the hub. (And as I write this @JDRoberts answered - do exactly what he says)
@nathancu Brings up another very important point specific to the smartthings platform: the route information you see is just the last route that was taken at the particular moment in time that the platform captured it. It’s not the complete route map, and it might be as much as 24 hours old.
Most zwave mapping utilities show you the possible routes in a topology table like this:
Smartthings shows you a single route record, not a complete map.
It’s entirely possible that your system is using the outlet, maybe even most of the time, it just didn’t get captured at the particular moment that the record was taken.
Also a fairly recent update enabled the Z wave routes listed on the IDE to be updated any time a repair is run. Previously it would only update once a day so you would have to wait until the next day after running the repair.
