I have a growing number of zwave units in both my house and my garage. I’m finding the garage units very unreliable and unpredictable. One moment it all works fine with lights turning on/off within 3 seconds. Other times they just won’t turn on/off and debug shows loads of timeouts.
The garage is around 25-30 meters from the house, where the controller (Pi + OH 2.5) is located. Looking at the specs that distance should not be a problem with Fibaro units quoting 50m outdoor and Aeotec range extenders quoting 130m outdoors. I even have a Fibaro Switch unit in a waterproof box half way between.
Any advice? Put a better repeater in a waterproof box outside? Could one of the garage units be faulty causing all the timeouts?
Any way to show connection strength between units to see if re-positioning would help?
I have thick solid stone walls, so struggle to get a signal to all parts of the house, let alone the my garden room. What I did was put a Pi with a 2nd z-stick in the garden room then shared the stick over the LAN - I think I followed this write up, and has been bulletproof so far Share Z-wave dongle over IP (USB over IP using ser2net / socat ) guide. This would obviously require you to have network in the garage, also the network viewer in habmin will break as it doesn’t seem to handle two zwave controllers
Interesting @elite, so the second Pi only has the z-stick and IP USB sharing stuff. How does OpenHAB then manage 2 sticks? Do you remove the garden room units from the first z-stick and re-add them to the new remote one? Or doesn’t it matter if they are on both?
This may be worth a try… I can probably run a long cat-6 cable.
Yes, the 2nd only has the z-stick and ser2net. IIRC, on the openhab machine you just install and configure socat and it just appears as a second zstick in OH.
You would remove the devices from the original zstick on the OH box, and then include onto the 2nd PI zstick
