I have a Z-Wave switch (Zen30) in my backyard that is used to control some lights in my chicken coop. It generally works well; however, at least once a month the node drops off the network and I have to go out to the coop to manually toggle it on/off to get it to reconnect. While this is not typically a concern, I am sometimes out of town when the switch fails to communicate, resulting in a situation where the light is on all night when I’m away. I’m trying to figure out how to improve the reliability of this particular switch.
The network graph for this particular node shows that it’s routed through at least one switch.
I’m not sure what to make of the numbers I’m getting, or what a “good” signal should be. So, I’m curious if anyone has any thoughts or suggestions to improve the connectivity.
hi, it looks like the SNR is too low, which means the switch is too far from the controller and its neighbours.
Any way you can improve the distance between the controller and the switch? Or any opportunities to add another zwave device that is closer to the chicken coupe?
One other idea - if the chicken coupe switch is in a metal box, see if you can replace it with a plastic one. Might help improve the marginal signal to something more reliable.
Adding to @couch67 's points, if you cannot improve the signal (To get to my garage I added a smartplug in my house as close as possible to the remote one and high so the cars parked between would stop interfering) then look into a zwave LR hub that will work with all your current stuff and a remote LR device that you can use to reach better. LR’s don’t mesh, but they transmit much farther.
Here’s something I discovered lately after 2+ years of manually resetting the circuit breaker (with everything else attached to that circuit) for one of my Z-Wave sockets.
When my Evolve Receptable falls off the network I go to the advanced options and hit ‘Refresh Values’:
