Most of my devices have ‘is_zwave_plus: true’. The two that don’t are my Zipato keypad and my Aeon USB stick (though I’m sure that’s supposed to be a plus device).
Does the fact that my keypad is not plus mean that everything else on my network is forced to run as non-plus?
Why does my usb stick show as not plus? It was the latest gen stick.
What would happen if I add a non-plus range extender into the network?
Cheers!!
No, as the keypad is battery powered, it doesn’t forward signals from other zwave units and thus doesn’t affect the protocol used. A plus unit forwarding this signal will forward it as a non-plus signal but also forward plus-signals as plus.
Your USB stick being identified as non-plus is a bigger problem, for zwave plus to work the controller must initiate it.
Weird but I have no idea.
Any signals routed through this extender would lose their plus status.
From what I understand, a zwave network can be both plus and non-plus att the same time (if the controller is plus). All units that connect either directly to the controller or mesh via plus units only will retain the plus functionality, any units that mesh via a non-plus unit will lose it. The only problem is that you can’t control how units mesh without physically moving them around.
Many of the advantages of zwave plus are available in a non-plus network too, such as improved antennas and battery time. OTA updates are obviously not available but I’ve never heard anyone use it, nor do I think that the lower bandwidth is much of a problem if you’re not doing OTA updates.
Everything I’ve read (which just shows how clear this situation really is) says that if you add any non-Plus powered node to your mesh then the whole mesh drops to non-Plus. That matches my own experience, where removing the final powered non-Plus device boosted the range of every device, even those that never communicated with it. As well as a loss of range you get a loss of bandwidth, which becomes more significant as you add more devices.
The situation with battery powered non-Plus devices is less clear, I’ve seen a much more mixed set of notes, though again I found a boost to the mesh when I removed them. That may just have been because they were in a location where communication was an issue though.
As for the stick showing non-Plus, that’s a known bug.
There are a few components of devices that are marketed as Z-Wave Plus compliant and some benefits are available in non-plus networks. I’ve worked on the device development side with classic Z-Wave (not with Plus), but here’s what I know about Z-Wave Plus:
To summarize: If you already have non-Plus devices, it’s probably not worth upgrading unless you have specific needs (longer range, etc) that may come with running a completely Z-Wave Plus network.
The bug around the Z-Stick not showing support the Z-Wave Plus may be because it doesn’t advertise support for the Z-Wave Plus command class - it functions largely as a dumb transceiver and HA/OpenZWave handle the communication.
How can one check range and speed of a zwave network? How did you notice the difference when removing the last non-plus unit?
For range, it was the easy thing of looking at the difference between the before and after neighbour lists. When I had the non-Plus devices, it was four hops to the garage door sensors, and many of the other further away units. Now the only devices that are three hops away are those door sensors (which is about the best it’ll get), and everything else is one or two hops away.
In terms of speed, I’m basing that off of speed of response (which is noticeably faster now).
Hmm thanks for the responses. Doesn’t sound like plus is thaaaat important, and I might have lost plus status just by having the keypad in the network.
So perhaps adding a cheap non-plus extender would be worth doing?
Remember that most if not all line powered devices act as repeaters (ie, wall switches, plug-in light/relay modules, non-battery thermostats).
Try to minimize the number of hops wherever possible. I’ve seen lots of issues come up when there’s more than 2 hop between nodes. This is especially true for secure devices as there’s many more messages required for secure communication.
And in addition to what @david202 said, try to avoid having a bottleneck - one or two devices through which all traffic flows. You can display the state of your mesh to spot any potential issues there.
Well, it makes a massive difference to the speed of your mesh, which becomes more and more important as you add devices…
Atm all my devices are battery powered and I can’t reach the back of my house to put a door sensor there. So I need something to boost my network.
Any powered node is an extender. Buy yourself a cheap Z-Wave Plus socket or similar.
Indeed, since the mesh is built entirely from those powered nodes - buy yourself a few of them.
Here in the UK cheap zwave plus sockets seem somewhat hard to come by. An Aeon Labs one is like £60.
that’s actually only £35. Wonder if it’s actually going to come as the UK version though.
Try Vesternet, for example here’s there Z-Wave plus sockets. £130 for a set of 5 (£26 each) from TKB - I’ve got a bunch of those for controlling various things, and they work well.