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This forum is now read-only for archive purposes.
very bad z-wave range
p0nts
Member
I have several Z-Wave devices that are unable to find Homey as soon as they are behind a normal wooden door, around 4 meters away from homey.
As soon as I open the door, Homey can see the devices again.
This is so bad ... Cant believe that I will not be able to have a contact sensor on my front door in a normal "rijtjeshuis", it sucks so hard.
And of course Z-Wave have a mesh network but that is not the solution.
As soon as I open the door, Homey can see the devices again.
This is so bad ... Cant believe that I will not be able to have a contact sensor on my front door in a normal "rijtjeshuis", it sucks so hard.
And of course Z-Wave have a mesh network but that is not the solution.
Comments
Hopefully the new zwave will make it all work better.. Lets wait and see
My house is build 2 years ago, maybe concrete issue? Also the failing sensors are battery powered.
In this state, I am unable to rely on any z-wave devices in my house, 433 mhz for example works great in the same spot where z-wave is not.
And one outside behind insulated wall and double glass.
Even though the outside one became less good with the latest update, got nothing to complain about.
Maybe you got something nearby homey or the sensor that absorbs/blocks wireless signals
Can defend the current range but it is not market ready too many has the same issue. I hope the Z-wave rewrite will be deep enough to tackle this issue.
Could you tell which Zwave device you are using and if the are battery powered or not?
also a fibaro motion sensor does not really have very good range here.
Impossible to get them working in the garden or front door, the moment i closed the windows or door the signal was gone.
3Meters distance with the door open in openview max 8 meters.
I have the feeling Homey cant handle mesh, its like they use a diffirent standard or something.
My other controller vera plus has no problem at all with the range.
Could it be something with open z-wave?
Distance of normal powered devices, have not tested range before 0.9.1 so can't really tell.
But indeed the grid/mesh/routing is not activated or implemented yet. hope this will be activated soon, will make the z-wave network way more stable
As far as I know all mains powered z-wave devices offer routing to out of range Z-wave devices regardless the main controller or it`s firmware. It is embedded in the firmware of the Z-wave nodes.
But what @caseda says could also be true:
Since Homey has to understand it can reach certain devices through hops which means it should keep some sort of routing table.
If the controller doesn't know what to do with the extra packets that is being added (thats why controllers can create a mesh map)
And/or doesn't know what to look for.
It will not do anything with that data.
And thus will only look for the original device data
Probably also the reason why range gets bad behind for example a (wooden) wall, if a little bit of the data is missing, it won't know what to do, and thus do nothing
(I say wood specifically because wood can absorb radio signals pretty well)
My Vera3 has 2 routing options, default zwave routing or the GetVera routing option. So that to me says that the zwave chip should be capable to handle routing default.
Homey isn't using default software, if they did they couldn't make the software like it is now (app based) and wouldn't have to rewrite the library (like they did last week) that is talking to the chip
So maybe the chip firmware is default, doesn't mean the talking to /from the chip is too.
And sure, it will come, it's just not used yet
Nodes (= powered devices) cannot Configure themselves to have good routing, for this they need an HEAL command from the primary node (a.k.a. Controller, homey in our case)
The HEAL command makes a table of what devices/nodes are neighbors of each other and with this table you can make routings.
So devices can't do anything on their own on the area of routing without a primary control that can HEAL
See my previous post, maybe you could shine some light?
This does not work straight away. It takes Homey some time to find the routing through the socket on the 1st floor to the power node on the 2nd floor.
Seems to me it builds the routing take through (with HEAL command) but it just takes time. But it would indeed be nice to hear from Athom got this is implemented.
Nevertheless, not being able to control a zwave product within 4m might be a different problem.
Thanx for clearing this and the additional info about routing and the used strategy!
Very glad to hear that you guys use Z-Wave own routing method/strategy!
The strange thing now is that my current the vera3 network is "rock solid" and pretty fast with ~20 greenwave endpoints. Hit poll device and within a second I see the current power usage of the connected device.
Hope you guys can optimize thing so Homey will have the same performance UX.
Z-wave also depends on the wireless hygiëne. If you have a Blokker babyphone or a aldi dect Phone you know you are broadcasting shit in to the air on z-wave frequency's
It might be your surroundings. Try tinkering around a little bit until you find a better configuration, or maybe add powered nodes so they can route information to other nodes.