I have (5) Schlage FE599 door locks which I believe are plain Z-Wave. Everything else I have is 500+ series and the locks are a bit temperamental.
Other than the Z-Wave performance, there’s nothing wrong with the locks so I’m curious if I can swap out the Z-Wave modules themselves to something like this?
Nope not with those. You have to build custom firmware for everything else in the lock to deal with the chip. You’d need to have something like the Yale with the replaceable module.
The only thing that you really need to worry about with that older ZWave module if it’s connected correctly and working is keep a good beaming capable repeating device nearby and try to keep the number of S0 connected devices to a minimum.
I have three BE469s - when my S0 traffic used to get high things started dropped and the first things to go were the locks.
I still have one of them - the other two succumbed to battery leak damage - but I have subsequently replaced both with the plus version of the same lock. (and my old lock cylinder transferred so I did not have to actually re-key the lock…)
As for S0 devices, the locks are the only securely added devices on my network. I live in the middle of nowhere so I figured the less overhead the better. Do I need to have a secure hop path if they cannot reach the controller directly? I always get conflicting answers with the question.