Aeotec extender not being used?

Vera Controllers, Services & Devices General Vera Discussions
#1

I have a Schlage BE469 deadbolt about 30 feet away from the controller. The signal path goes through two walls.

The battery life has been fairly abysmal (drops to 50% within a month; all my other identical deadbolt locks last 6+ months), so I surmised that maybe the signal strength was weak, so I plugged in an Aeotec Extender between the devices (actually, about 5 feet from the deadbolt, so much closer) and paired it with the controller.

It didn’t resolve the battery issue, so I did some digging in the various Advanced settings and as far as I can tell, the deadbolt is still associating directly with the controller (the id_parent is still 1), even after several months, multiple unpair/pair processes, several “update neighbor nodes,” etc.

My question is: how do I see which node my deadbolt is connected to and, if it isn’t the extender, how can I guide the deadbolt to connect to it instead of bypassing it and reaching all the way to the controller?

This seems like a case where a nightly network heal might be useful, except it seems that Vera did away with that in a firmware update awhile back, and now there’s no way to trigger one… :thinking:

#2

If you haven’t turned off polling of the lock in Vera, or set it much higher than the default 60 seconds, anything else you do is not going to have a big impact. Vera will mash the batteries polling at the default interval (and the more complex secure channel interaction also seems to make the system less stable/more susceptible to deadlocks and reloads).

#3

I have found Schlage’s (particularly older ones) just don’t like to place nice with most other devices as a pass through, they can be tricky (if not impossble) to get them to use a repeater device, One I had Schlages just wouldn’t function at all if it was running through a repeater, so you might be out of luck depending on the age of your lock. And unfortunately you can’t update the firmware on them either.

I think you can do a Update Neighbor Nodes in the Device Option table of the device to try the heal the mesh for the lock to see if it will pick up neighboring nodes, but I have found Schlages are just happiest when close to the Vera.

#4

Also keep in mind that the lock is probably an S2 device, and if the repeater is not, I don’t think that will work. So if your Aeotec Extender is a 6 or earlier, that could be the reason.