VeraPlus Zigbee limitation

I purchased a keen smart vent for every single vent in my home (clearance at lowes) - I have only been successful in pairing a maximum of 8 ZigBee devices at once… any number higher than that and nothing will be recognized by the veraplus (even devices listed as having the best compatibility). this 8 device maximum happens when I pair certified compatible only, uncertified (keen vents) only, and a mixture thereof. no matter what I do, I cannot have more than 8 ZigBee devices recognized at once.

I’ve contacted customer support but they were unhelpful both times… the first time I was given a link to force the open join for ZigBee that did not work (initially I had a different problem with my ZigBee radio). the second time the rep stated he could not see any problem with the veraplus.

at this point, I am ready to jump ship to something else… homeseer is having a blackfriday in may sale, maybe I will go with that. smartthings seems to support every single device I currently own (including the vents).

anyone have any recommendations or thoughts about my ZigBee problem?

Look at the threads. Everyone is jumping ship.

Right now I’ve gone to Wink, very promising with a caveat of not having a webui, but in progress.

Homeseer is good, I may go that at some point.

[quote=“Thinkfire, post:2, topic:196291”]Look at the threads. Everyone is jumping ship.

Right now I’ve gone to Wink, very promising with a caveat of not having a webui, but in progress.

Homeseer is good, I may go that at some point.[/quote]

is the wink hub still hackable? I have one of the original that bricked - could maybe use ftdi or something to unbrick and flash… how about the new version of wink? i’d prefer to not have their device “phoning” home in order to be used.

I was looking at smart things also.

I have read the Wink hub can be bridged to Vera to control ZigBee devices with good results.

Yep! So far all zigbee stuff I’ve been able to control in vera by them being included in a wink 2 hub. Imperihome even sees them.

I have at my vacation house 1 Winkhub1 and 1 VeraPlus ,at my house 3 VeraPlus and 1 Winkhub2.
If somebody open the door at my vacation house it turn on a Zigbee light at 1% for 5 seconds then turn off after.
So my Winkhub2 at my house know the light has been turn on at 1% it tell to my VeraPlus to play an annoucement on Sonos at my house.

Sorry for my explanation I m French

So I figured out a way around my 8 device limitation…

Go under add device, then z-wave generic… the luup blue bar comes up telling me to add a device. I F5 the screen which takes me back to devices, then go back into add device and now select generic ZigBee. Then ctrl+F5, device should now show up ready to configure… if it doesn’t, reload luup.

if this does not work and you have access to a zwave device that always fails to configure (I have some crappy window sensors that never worked right), you can add a new zwave device then select retry to remove the node, after removing the node and attempting to repair it, vera will be unable to configure the crappy device (I think they are enerwave or something)… this causes the vera to keep open the “add a device” in luup - just follow the steps you would to add a generic ZigBee and it will add.

I also added two Iris-branded Centralite 3210-L binary devices from Lowe’s (you have to change it to binary light after initial addition as it will first show up as a dimmer). Prior to adding these two ZigBee (and zwave) repeaters, I would have half of my smart vents drop off the network. They seem to have improved the responsiveness of the mesh.

If I continue to face dropouts I will probably create a scene to periodically close then open the problematic vents or possibly add another two ZigBee repeaters to the network.

I spoke too soon… neither methods work now. i’d love to know what the heck is wrong.

Quit fighting with it! Compliment the Vera with a wink hub (i know the hub 2 works, not sure about the original hub) and include all your zigbee into wink. Get one from Amazon and try it and if it don’t work, return it. Who knows, you may even get voice control (Wink/Alexa) over them vents of yours- how cool would that be! :slight_smile: