Hi guys, I’m having trouble with my Fibaro switches. I have one I use to open my garage door. It usually is fine until I use it once. I open the door, then I’m not able to close it again as Hassio tells me it’s dead. If I then go and trigger the switch manually by pressing the button, it works and shows again in perfect health in Hassio.
I have one I use less often, which sometimes shows up dead and is then also revived by a manual button press.
Any idea what’s wrong? Does it have anything to do with polling?
Thanks a million in advance!
Antoine
Is the device at the periphery of your Z-wave network? Are there any nearby line powered, not battery zwave devices that can act as a repeater?
When the device is alive on the network check the device attributes averageRequestRTT and averageResponseRTT. If you got a good signal the values should be below 100. If you have a bad/marginal signal the values will go above 1,000. The neighbors attribute will list the node ids of other zwave devices it can directly contact, if that value is doesn’t contain many devices the device is definitely on the fringe.
I am guessing your garage door when raised could be blocking the already weak signal.
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Hi Eric, thank you for taking the time to reply. It is indeed at the periphery and the average RTT request/response are 348/409, pretty bad. Weird is I got another fibaro switch 2/3rd of the way between the Pi and the garage, and that one’s got 44/48. From there on, there’s only two walls and about 30ft to the garage switch, i’m surprised this decreases the results so much.
You seem pretty sure this is the problem so your advice would be to get myself a repeater to place along the way?
Noobie question: when we say wired devices act as repeaters, does it mean every device sends out a fresh 100% strong signal, or does the signal “split” in some way?
Just about any zwave device that is powered by AC power, not batteries also functions as a repeater within the mesh network. Basically if a device can’t contact the controller directly it can use another AC powered Zwave device as in intermediary to store and forward the data for it. Battery operated zwave devices can make use of AC powered zwave devices as a repeater, but the battery operated device cannot act as repeaters for other devices. The more Zwave devices that are in proximity to one another the more robust the network as the devices will have multiple paths to try in event of failure.
If you add more devices on the side of the house by the garage, the more possible paths there will be.
There is a project at https://github.com/OmenWild/home-assistant-z-wave-graph which will give a visualization of the mesh network.
Metal does a pretty good job at blocking radio waves. If the fibaro switch is in a metal junction box, the box can act as a shield. The same is true of your garage door, assuming it is metal. One of my zwave switches for an outdoor post light completely encased in a metal pole. The RTT times are bad even though it is 20 feet away from the nearest device, but it works.
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IMHO a dedicated repeater is a wast of money. I was going to recommend a GoControl Zwave Plus bulb as a very inexpensive “repeater” that I have picked up on Amazon for $16 - $18 but I see they are now $35. ???
Thanks again for the thorough explanation. Given my current config, it makes sense, there’s a lot of metal indeed.
I’ll go and get myself some repeaters, dedicated or not.