Need help with connecting two buildings and a better understanding of the 4 hop.

Community Playground General Discussions
1

I’m in the middle of a church automation project that has 16 thermostats, 2 timers, and 3 door sensors. I began the project in the largest building which has 9 thermostats, 2 timers, and a door sensor. Everything in this building is working great. A 60’ catwalk connects to another building that has the remaining(non communicating) 2 doors and 7 thermostats. After reading several posts I now realize that I should not have paired everything in the location near the controller, but what is done is done. I also now realize that tying the two buildings together with door sensors (battery) is also a mistake. The building that works in a two story metal building and the other building is brick and about 60’ away. Need help developing a plan to connect to the other building, also I’m a little worried about the 4 hop limit getting back to the controller (Vera Edge). Would appreciate any and all help that could be provided, I need a better understanding of the 4 hop limit. Thanks in Advance!!

2

I highly doubt you will get both buildings working reliably on 1 controller. It is too far to bridge multiple devices across.

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3

Thanks JasonJoel, I’ve got an extra Vera lite and had been considering it.

4

I hate to say it, but this sounds like a configuration that would be great for HomeSeer with Z-Nets. Meaning separate Z-Nets at each location, tied together via ethernet and controlled by a single controller. If I leave Vera (right now things work) I am going to a distributed model with a Z-Net on each floor of my 3 story townhome… Too bad Vera isn’t looking at supporting Z-Nets or something similar instead of only supporting Z-Wave on the controller itself.

5

If you have 8 nodes in a straight line each separated by 25 feet and you want to get to Node8

   Vera            Node1           Node2          Node3         Node4        Node5         Node6    Node7   Node8

You might think this will work Vera → Node2 → Node 4 → Node6 → Node8

But Z-Wave might try Node1 → Node2 → Node3- Node4 and give up! i.e. it does not ALWAYS go to the furthest node it can reach in the right direction in one hop and try to continue from there!

6

I have wished for the same thing. I have a detached RV & 4Car with bathroom, casitas and such and it’s maybe a 50ft gap. I have gotten things to work but there are times after upgrades that those devices are just a pain since they are on the brink of out of range. Any slight routing hickup and they all go down.

I tried Homeseer with the same thinking you have. Lucky for me they have a 30 day trial and I’m back here looking for other solutions.

I use homewave and Imperihome both whcih can use multiple controllers in the same page so running two different veras would be an easy task expect for using devices from both in one scene. Even then it can be done, just a bit more work.

I say test the water and try some options.

7

I run one of my Veras in a building detached from my house. Stupidly, when I renovated the outbuilding, I forgot to run an underground ethernet cable… stupid, stupid, stupid.

However, I got around the problem using ethernet-over-power with a couple of Netgear bridges. Works a treat. I get ~50 Mbits/sec which is far more than required for the network. Might be something you could consider if running an ethernet cable is out of the question.

Don’t even think of trying this with Zwave.

8

[quote=“RichardTSchaefer, post:5, topic:189781”]If you have 8 nodes in a straight line each separated by 25 feet and you want to get to Node8

   Vera            Node1           Node2          Node3         Node4        Node5         Node6    Node7   Node8

You might think this will work Vera → Node2 → Node 4 → Node6 → Node8

But Z-Wave might try Node1 → Node2 → Node3- Node4 and give up! i.e. it does not ALWAYS go to the furthest node it can reach in the right direction in one hop and try to continue from there![/quote]

Thanks, I wasn’t sure if I could lock what it looks for or not, but it appears that I either can’t or shouldn’t try.

9

I tried Homeseer with the same thinking you have. Lucky for me they have a 30 day trial and I’m back here looking for other solutions.[/quote]
Interesting. I was looking at homeseer just yesterday (although not with znet). Anything specific you didn’t like?

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10

I tried Homeseer with the same thinking you have. Lucky for me they have a 30 day trial and I’m back here looking for other solutions.[/quote]
Interesting. I was looking at homeseer just yesterday (although not with znet). Anything specific you didn’t like?

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My issues were with mobile alerts, mobile apps, devices supported (plugins or lack of) and I never fully got the grasp of the logic part like I use PLEG for.