Ok I have about 100 devices that consist of about 40 GE Dimmers, 35 Plug-in modules, 3 CA3750’s, 7 Thermostats, 10 Leviton Zone controllers a yale lock and a schlage lock. (also a variety of A/V things). I have been trying to get this reliable and am having some trouble keeping things running. I am wondering since my house is pretty big and spread out should I break this up with 3 vera’s instead? I have a Vera 3 trying to do all of this, I am starting to think maybe I should buy two of the Vera Lite’s as slaves.
Question: Am I making it more complex by doing this? And when I use an app like iVera or SquareConnect am I going to make it painful to control things because I now have to switch between Vera’s? Or does the Master Vera see all the slaves and I only really need to talk to that?
What kind off issues are you running into? Are you having issues with communication to the devices? If you decide to get an extra vera or two, you can bridge the vera 3/lites into your Vera 3 and have control over those devices. If you need to add, remove, repair the zwave network for those devices that are on the vera 3/lite, you would need to access that vera to perform those tasks. If you access the main Vera via an app, it should show the devices of the other vera’s (as long as they are bridged together).
personally I think you’d be much better breaking your network up and from my understanding when you merge your data from the vera lites to the vera 3 they should act as one so I’d assume that if you were using ivera or squarconnect they shouldn’t see 3 different vera’s but I’m not speaking from experience so I could be completely wrong in which case completely dis-regard my post and consider it a +1 ;D ;D
You will not be able to perform zwave related tasks like including, excluding, repairing the zwave network and so forth from the main Vera. You will need to perform these tasks from the vera that the device is included to.
[quote=“garrettwp, post:2, topic:170457”]What kind off issues are you running into? Are you having issues with communication to the devices? If you decide to get an extra vera or two, you can bridge the vera 3/lites into your Vera 3 and have control over those devices. If you need to add, remove, repair the zwave network for those devices that are on the vera 3/lite, you would need to access that vera to perform those tasks. If you access the main Vera via an app, it should show the devices of the other vera’s (as long as they are bridged together).
The primary issues are things not configuring or devices working one day then suddenly getting the message “no information from device” Part of the reason for so many plug-in modules is that I use them to strengthen the mesh. My house was built in 1924 and they used a stucco like material when finishing the walls (wire mesh coated). My house is also fairly large (3 stories about 7000 sqft) with a separate garage. The question is will this make things better or more complicated (i.e. fragile)
Ok I rebuilt my network with One Vera3Pro and two Vera Lite’s . So far the network has been stable (finally). There are a few bugs however. If you have a scene controller (Leviton VRCZ4-MRX for example) and you assign scenes the incorrect scenes are shown in the master MIOS unit. Also if you assign scenes on the master (when the devices have been imported) the scene triggers DO NOT work. The UI response is a bit slower on the imported devices as well, but only slightly. So with the exception of the scenes (It appears I will have to create scenes in the slave units and assigned them there) all is working well.
Are your CA3750s working reliably now? I haven’t found any way to make mine reliable, so maybe a Veralite for the pool equipment shed?[/quote]
I ended up putting an outdoor plug-in module within 3 feet of the CA3750 and that is within 3 feet of another plug-in module inside in a window. Now that my network is broken most modules are 0-1 hops from Vera which has helped tremendously
I have a little bit of experience with a large network one of my networks has 48 four button zone controllers and around 90 switches/relays/dimmers.
I experienced loads of issues because of the number of four button zone controllers. The server would constantly crash not to mention the time it would take to configure any devices. I was told that these controllers use more resources on the sever, and that the amount that I was using was the issue.
The setup that has worked for me and seems to be running stable is I have one vera3 and three vera2’s I have included all the zone controllers into the vera3 (I have zone controllers all over the home) and each floor has a vera2 with all the devices on that level included, after using the UPNP functionality on the units I added them all to the “Main Server” (the vera3) Now when I create a scene I can configure the zone controllers and all is great.
So I have had positive results with splitting up my network, I was having so many problems with this particular job I was more than happy to buy the additional servers to solve the problem.
[quote=“goingtohurt, post:9, topic:170457”]I have a little bit of experience with a large network one of my networks has 48 four button zone controllers and around 90 switches/relays/dimmers.
I experienced loads of issues because of the number of four button zone controllers. The server would constantly crash not to mention the time it would take to configure any devices. I was told that these controllers use more resources on the sever, and that the amount that I was using was the issue.
The setup that has worked for me and seems to be running stable is I have one vera3 and three vera2’s I have included all the zone controllers into the vera3 (I have zone controllers all over the home) and each floor has a vera2 with all the devices on that level included, after using the UPNP functionality on the units I added them all to the “Main Server” (the vera3) Now when I create a scene I can configure the zone controllers and all is great.
So I have had positive results with splitting up my network, I was having so many problems with this particular job I was more than happy to buy the additional servers to solve the problem.[/quote] @goingtohurt
Interesting, that sounds like my issue, although I only have about 10-12 zone controllers but will have over 100 other devices. I do have 4-5 more of the Monster branded ones yet to install but had been holding back until my network was stable. I have broken my network up via physical location versus module type. SO adding the zone controllers to your Vera 3 you are still relying on zwave mesh to ‘talk’ to these right? They are on my main unit but some only because they were imported via the mios bridging method, scene setup doesn’t work then (apparently)
The Zone controllers are on a separate home id, as are each other server, so the whole house has four networks and I have all the servers connected with a patch cord.
I have turned off the “use mios routing” on the main server because the server still has issues with crashing with that option ON.
The other three networks I have the “use mios routing” ON.
On the main server I have all the controllers and only controllers and no devices in it for a few reasons, one is that when I activate a scene it forces the scene to run through the server and not directly associate with a device, the result is that I get LED’s to update throughout the house because the server will actually see that the scene has ran and update the wall LED’s.
I had issues with LED’s not updating if the Zone controllers and devices where on the same server, because of direct association, now when I run a scene on a wall controller in the basement within around 10 seconds it will update any wall controllers that has that same scene assigned.
It was very important to my client that the LED feature worked.
One last thing when running a scene from the wall controllers you will notice a slight delay in the scene running maybe a half second.
Sometimes I’m not the greatest at explaining things so let me know if I can help in any way, all these actions are based on about 250hrs of install and would have been SO much faster had I known all these issues beforehand.
In this install I used all Leviton Zone Controllers and the dimmers and switches where Evolve/ACT and Leviton
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