Z-Wave Range Issues

[rsw686]

I've about had it with Z-Wave. I'm hoping someone has some advice on how to troubleshoot this. I have 4 Schlage Z-Wave locks in my house (all on the first floor and one in the attached garage). I also have 3 Leviton Vizia RF+ VRR15-1LZ outlets. The outlets say they support beaming so I'm using them to repeat the signal between the locks. The 3 locks inside my house work great and so do the two outlets. The garage outlet is literally 5 feet away from the inside outlet, but it has to go through 2 walls one of which is insulated. Basically it is going through the garage wall and a pantry wall to the outlet. The garage outlet is hit or miss and the lock, which is 2 feet away from the garage outlet, only works if I leave the door going to the garage open.
 
The range on Z-Wave is absolutely horrible. I originally had a Vera and swapped to a SmartThings hub and there is no change. The hub is located in my family room central to the three inside locks. Besides cutting the wall open and adding an outlet in the pantry I'm lost for how to resolve this. Additionally none of these consumer hubs give you any debugging on the device peering nodes or signal strength. Or maybe these Leviton outlets are just horrible signal repeaters. Either way I just want it to work without throwing a ton of money trying random solutions.

 

[wkearney99]

RF signal strength is definitely going to be affected by some construction materials more than other.  Masonry, lead paint, metal, seem to have the greatest impact, but others can likewise be a problem.  One wall made of certain materials/methods could be worse than 5 not.  Hard to know, thus 'more repeating devices' is not just a sales pitch to get more of them sold...
 
That and how you set up the devices can z-wave, as the learn their place in 'the mesh' based on when you set them up.  Which may be different than where they finally got installed.  I'm no z-wave expert here, and don't have those devices, but it might be worth looking into how to best 'reset everything' now that they're finally installed in-place.  

 

[xlurkr]

I think you can run multiple Veras and bridge them (disclaimer: I only have one, but read about this), so if you can run CAT5 or have WiFi reception in the garage that might be a solution.  I don't know anything about multiple SmartThings hubs.
 
-Tom

 

[rsw686]

I have reset the devices when I moved from the Vera to SmartThings hub. It annoys me as I have one RadioRA 2 controller and the range will reach to my detached shop 100 ft from the house and the controller is in the basement. This won't even go 5 ft through a drywall wall with insulation. I just don't see how this product is usable period. Yes I could buy another SmartThings hub for my garage, but that seems excessive. The house is 2,100 sq ft and should be simple for Z-Wave to work in. It's just frustrating as Z-Wave is a black box with no insight to what is going on with the mesh. I can't see the routing table to even diagnose the issue.

 

[vc1234]

Additionally none of these consumer hubs give you any debugging on the device peering nodes or signal strength.

 
Very true. Without having any feedback from the controller, you are groping in the dark. I have finally got some partial grip on my few remaining zwave gadgets having built a diy RF sniffer.  Here's what I posted elsewhere:
 
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1. Initially, I was motivated by my thermos missing setpoint commands from the controller. Then, as I wrote earlier, one lock added some additional aggravation.
 
The first attempt was to use an RTL SDR USB stick ($20) to intercept zwave packets. It was only a partially successful attempt because  with the RTL I needed to do quite a bit DSP processing since the radio itself was not good enough.  Even so I was losing about 50% of packets which was not terribly useful. There are some published information on the internet if you google for rtl sdr zwave, however, none of them worked for me perhaps because they used a fancier more expensive ($200) SDR such as HackRF.
 
I have some experience with using TI CC1110 chips and decided to try them. When I started writing a simple piece of firmware (gettting a packet and sending what's captured through a serial port to a PC), I found this : https://www.insinuat...e-z-wave-part-1 which was exactly the same as I was doing hardware-wise. Their firmware did not work for me though because it was written for  European frequency of 868Mhz rather than the US  908.42 Mhz and could not read older 9600 baud zwave gadgets, only 40K ones. So, I finished writing mine which was pretty simple. 
 
So, for hardware I used http://www.ti.com/to...1110dk-mini-868 which buys you two radios and a firmware programmer at $75.  I use one radio for 40K devices and the other for the few remaining 9.6K units.  A radio is attached to a USB port via a 3v3 TTL cable.  I might have used a CC1111 mini kit which is one USB stick that does not require a connecting cable, but at $75 it buys you only one radio and I needed two.
 
2. A lock repeater device does not appear to require secure protocol feature, but rather "beaming" ability.  It means that it should be able to repeat special "beaming" packets to wake up a battery device.  The beaming packed is merely hex "55"+dev id to wake up repeated for about a second about a hundred or so times. According to my traces, for one of my locks a thermostat is a repeating device that retransmits  "beaming" packets to the lock.  The thermostat itself is not a secure device.  In fact,  all the devices in my network except locks communicate in clear text, thus easily spoofable,  which by itself is a major protocol design flaw.
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The sniffer feature that could have easily been provided by the controller is RSSI measurement (provided by CC1110 "for free") . It allows me to know exactly what zwvae signal strength level  is at any location in my house.
 
Weak RF signal is one of zwave misfeatures (as I recall it's -2dbm max in Gen3), and there are many of those.  They've allegedly boosted the signal to 2dbm in Gen 5 but that's of little use to those who have older devices.  Your locks may also have a weak receiver.  I am pretty happy with my Yale locks.  Even the farthest can reach the controller directly.  On humid days, it retransmits via an adjacent thermostat.
 
 
I've migrated to RadioRa2 as much as I could.  The setup is so reliable that I am not motivated to reverse engineer it .  However, this path has a lot of its own issues: while technology is not as brain dead as zwave's their customer related policies definitely are.  They can be defined as mildly diy-hostile (the control4 crowd would be extremely hostile).

 

[rsw686]

I've migrated to RadioRa2 as much as I could.  The setup is so reliable that I am not motivated to reverse engineer it .  However, this path has a lot of its own issues: while technology is not as brain dead as zwave's their customer related policies definitely are.  They can be defined as mildly diy-hostile (the control4 crowd would be extremely hostile).

 
I went all RadioRA 2 for the lighting and couldn't be happier. The controller firmware upgrades are a pain and I had to direct connect the laptop to the unit. Other than that it's rock solid and just works. I wish they had a lock option. Z-Wave seemed like the best choice for locks so I purposely picked up Z-Wave outlets to repeat the signal to avoid this issue. It sounds like my fix is to move the garage outlet into the insulated wall. This removes the fire rated garage drywall and insulation in the path between it and the other outlet which is on the adjacent house wall. I just can't believe the range is this bad. My wireless AP reaches into the garage and its on the upstairs floor of my house.

 

[rsw686]

Or maybe the issue is the Vizia RF+ VRR15-1LZ  outlet is not a good repeater. Any suggestions for in wall outlets that have a strong signal? I don't want bricks hanging off the wall and my light switches are already Radio RA 2.

 

[wkearney99]

They can be defined as mildly diy-hostile (the control4 crowd would be extremely hostile).

 
Not as hostile as the Crestron crowd, oi.  Lutron's gotten a lot "less worse" in recent years.  If you have under 100 devices it's a simple online test to get their software for programming it.  To go over that you need to attend one of their free classes in person.

 

[wkearney99]

I don't want bricks hanging off the wall 

 
Do you have metal or plastic junction boxes?  The latter tend to pass RF a little better.  

 

[rsw686]

Do you have metal or plastic junction boxes?  The latter tend to pass RF a little better.  

 
They are all plastic. The house was built in the 80s.

 

[vc1234]

Or maybe the issue is the Vizia RF+ VRR15-1LZ  outlet is not a good repeater. Any suggestions for in wall outlets that have a strong signal? I don't want bricks hanging off the wall and my light switches are already Radio RA 2.

As mentioned, gen3 devices based on the ZM3102 zensys chip should be pretty much equally bad since their transmit power level should be the same. Perhaps, some have better printed board/antenna characteristics, but without measuring each device RF behavior, it's impossible to say. 
 
There is a claim floating on the internet that an Aeon Gen5 siren is a good repeater. Some folks used to improve RF range for their locks. Since, I do not own one, I do not know whether the claim is valid. I guess you could try and ship it back to Amazon if it does not work. Pretty silly, though, to use a siren if you don't need it. A gen5 device is supposed to have three radios built in (9.6K/40K/100K), so it "should" work, theoretically.
 
The 2.4GHz WiFi is not a good comparison since its power level is much higher than that of zwave(about 15-18 dbm for a typical laptop) which is, what, about 60x higher ?  Although, due to higher frequency, wifi penetration is a bit worse.The FCC allowed even higher power levels for the 5GHz wifi (http://arstechnica.com/civis/viewtopic.php?f=10&t=1246109).

 

[JonW]

I hate to say it, but every time I see a thread like this it reminds me of how fortunate I am to NOT use zwave.   I went with UPB for lighting (before Zwave was around) and use Zigbee for locks.

 

[Sparkman1]

I would recommend the Aeotec Repeater: http://aeotec.com/z-wave-repeater.  You could also try a passive repeater which would simply be two antennas tuned for the 900 MHz band connected together using coax with one in the garage and the other in the house. Did you re-optimize the devices after you reset them?
 
Other controllers do give better info on how the routing works.  I use HomeSeer and you can see the exact route the device uses to talk back to the HS z-wave interface.  Having said that, there are no good/cheap consumer level tools available to troubleshoot.  I have over 90 devices in my z-wave network and it's very reliable.  However, the routing can be a little weird given the complexity of RF propagation  I have some devices in far corners of the second story and also in the basement that talk directly to the controller that's located on the main floor and I have others that are physically much closer, but hop through a few other nodes to get back to the controller.  All my electrical boxes are metal.  
 
Cheers
Al

 

[rsw686]

The 2.4GHz WiFi is not a good comparison since its power level is much higher than that of zwave(about 15-18 dbm for a typical laptop) which is, what, about 60x higher ?  Although, due to higher frequency, wifi penetration is a bit worse.The FCC allowed even higher power levels for the 5GHz wifi (http://arstechnica.com/civis/viewtopic.php?f=10&t=1246109).

 
I understand that. I was looking at it more from the point that if WiFi had the range of Z-Wave it would be unusable. It is just surprising they didn't spec a slightly higher power level in ZWave so you could have a reasonable distance between devices.

 

[vc1234]

It is just surprising they didn't spec a slightly higher power level in ZWave so you could have a reasonable distance between devices.

 
They came to their senses a little bit and specified 2dbm for the Gen5 chip.  Perhaps, that's why the aforementioned siren helped some folks with their locks if the claim is true.