I tried to turn some devices on just now and they weren’t responding - i figured I’d do some troubleshooting and I pulled up the Advanced Devices paged on the smartthings website.
I’m seeing that all of my zwave based devices are offline but all of my zigbee devices are working fine. I rebooted the hub and rebuilt the zwave network, but the zwave devices are all still showing as offline. I’m noticing that the devices that are constantly going unresponsive are all zwave devices.
A few questions for the hive:
What can i do to improve zwave stability?
Why would my zwave devices be dropping, but not the zigbee devices?
Two different radios, two different networks. In addition, they operate on very different frequencies. I could bring a 1990s baby monitor into your house and take out your entire Z wave network and Zigbee would be completely unaffected. Or I could install Wi-Fi boosters and take out the Zigbee network while the Z wave devices would continue to run happily.
They’re housed in the same plastic box, but otherwise from a network engineering standpoint they are completely separate networks. So it’s never surprising if you’re having an issue with one and not the other.
It’s like parking your motorcycle next to your car in the same garage. It’s not surprising if the car doesn’t start, but the motorcycle runs fine. There are a few things that could affect both, like if the whole house burns down, but most of the time they are just two separate independent systems.
As far as improving your Z wave network, it depends very much on the specific devices you have and how far they are physically located from each other.
Start by reading post 11 in the following FAQ, then go up to the top of that topic and read the whole thing and then we can talk more about it. I will link directly to post 11
WOW - that post has a ton of really good information, thank you for sharing!!
It never occurred to me that the zwave devices didn’t automatically build their route tables (or whatever it’s called in the zwave world), that could explain some of the trouble i’ve had over the years - I do the bench install you describe: I pair a device at my desk, then move it to where it needs to go.
It’s good to know that battery zwave devices don’t usually repeat the signal; All but one of the zwave devices i’m running are plug-in devices - they’re all smart switches. At a glance, it looks like everything i have that’s battery powered is Zigbee.
My setup right now is:
Door lock - about 20 feet away from hub.
Aeotec outlet - about 12feet away from hub.
GE Outlet - about 16 feet away from the hub.
Aeotec multipurpose sensor - about 5 feet away from the hub.
These are the 4 closest zwave devices to the hub. The multipurpose sensor is the closest and has line of sight and the door lock is the furthest away, with the most obstructions (walls).
The door lock, the furthest away device with the most obstructions, is the only online device.
I’ve done a zwave repair a couple times, but that was before reading your article… I’m going to give that process a try, in the morning.
It would be really powerful if you could see both the route tables and signal strength per node.
I’ll update after i go through those steps, in the morning.
It would, indeed. Most Z wave only hubs do provide a utility to do that, but sadly SmartThings never has had an official one and doesn’t look like it ever will.
There have been some third-party methods for doing this, but I’m not sure which ones are up-to-date and the ones that require using a different edge Driver can mess up your existing routines so that you have to rebuild them after you go back to the original driver.
Since I’m not current on this stuff, I’ll leave it to other people to discuss.
