The garage in my house that has always been hit or miss in terms of Zwave responsiveness. Sometimes it works flawlessly (for months at a time) then other times some devices work, others don’t. The garage is a floor below everything else in my house. My living room is directly over it, and has 4 zwave devices that include repeaters. I thought that should cover the garage but maybe not?
I’m currently using an Aeotec Z-stick gen 5+ as my controller. I read somewhere that the Z-stick 7 had a slightly improved range to it. Would it help if I upgraded my controller? Would that somehow make the devices in the living room work better as repeaters? (I don’t understand how that would be). I read the 7 uses a bridge library where the 5 does something different. I don’t even know what that means, let alone if it would help me.
It could. There are issues with the 700 series firmware that’s causing alot of suffering for some folks. So I’m still on gen5+ and have 700 and 800 series sticks collecting dust.
The network map in zwavejsui can be helpful for seeing how the mesh is. Post of picture of that.
While it’s hard to know from a pic, the mesh is not all that large. So if a node has a communication problem, there may not be a viable second route. While adding more nodes may be the solve, let’s look at these 3 items first.
a) look at the location of the stick, make sure it is away from computer, routers, microwaves, compressors, stone / tile walls - basically anything that could cause RF/EM interference or physical interference. As an example, I had mine mounted 5 feet from WiFi base station on a wall whose other side was a tiled shower. I moved it to the other side of the room so now it is 10’ from WiFi and on a drywall wall. Much better.
b) do your failures happen when trying to operate the device? I’ve has a lot of success by exercising all the mains powered devices. Meaning I have automations that run and refresh the switch values, thermostat values several times an hour. I have, knock on wood, never had a dead node. I think this keeps the routes active and allow the mesh to continue to optimize. I also track the RTT diagnostic sensor and chart them to see how the nodes are functioning.
c) do you have any energy meters that may be reporting too much data? Look at the RX stats for each device and see if there are any with a significantly high number of RXs. As an example, I have a smart switch on my TV and apparently TV power varies widely based on the scene (a mostly black screen uses alot less than a bright scene), and as a result I was getting thousands of updates whenever watching TV. Too much traffic on zwave will causes failures.
