Hi guys, I got my veralite about 3 weeks ago, since then I’ve installed a whole bunch of different devices and I’m having issues making this thing run reliably.
All of the devices are fairly close to one another, no more than 20 feet between them (no more than 1 wall and 1 floor between each device). However I’m constantly having comm issues. Most common issues are with battery operated devices. What’s weird is that they will work for a while then stop, like today, all day my multisensor and kwikset door lock were working, i saw them submitting statuses to vera, then around 8pm as i got home, they stopped working, no more updates for the “tripped” state of the motion sensor and kwikset no longer reports lock/unlock.
When I try to do a zwave repair, all of the devices report “0 good routes out of 0” even when they’re all working fully.
My devices are and they’re all spread out around the house to try to achieve reliable communication:
about 8 light switches, different brands just to compare (GE/Jasco, Intermatic, Linear)
kwikset door lock
aeotec multisensor
However I’m still getting really strange results, for example, a switch in my office gets 100% ping success, however a switch just above it in another room, maybe 8 feet away fails 100% of the time.
Oh, my vera is running the latest firmware, 1.6.641
Please help.
Your communication issues are due to signal quality. The further degradation of signal, when you get home, suggests that it is likely due to interference. Perhaps there is some device that you turn on when home that uses the same or similar frequency as your Z-Wave network, 908.42MHz in the U.S. Do you have a baby monitor?
There are two ways to resolve your issues. Eliminate the interference or add intermediate Z-Wave nodes to improve the signal quality of the Z-Wave mesh network.
That’s a great point i totally forgot about the baby monitor, we actually do have one in the house.
I’m going to try to get a 1.9ghz monitor and see if that fixes my weird RF issues
While I have your attention though, what does that 0 good routes out of 0 mean? It says that for all my nodes, even ones that are really close and when i stress test them give 100% results. Is that message just a glitch or is something fundamentally wrong with my setup?
Why not try simply turning off the baby monitor and seeing if it makes a difference before unnecessarily spending money on another monitor.
When Vera performs a heal it also calculates routes for devices and then tests those routes. If Vera had determined 5 routes to a device and in testing 2 of them failed or were bad, then Vera would report 3 good routes out of 5.
0 good routes out of 0 means that Vera has no routes for the device, so it tests 0 and has 0 good routes. This may indicate a problem. Or it may indicate that the device is close enough to Vera that there are no routes and Vera speaks to the device directly.
Well, my problem is that my issues are not consistent so i’m having a hard time singling out the cause.
I’m going to get a new baby monitor just because they’re so cheap and if I see improvement over a few days then I’ll know that was it.
At any one point I can get all of the devices talking, but they’ll all randomly start to fail without any correlation to other events, like baby monitor being on or me arriving home, or anything else I can think of. needless to say at this point i’m just confused.
I even bought an RF meter that can sense 900mhz, going to go around and measure my devices for rf emissions and see if something is possibly noisy. Could be anything, even a TV.