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Battery powered devices like door locks and battery powered thermostats cannot forward messages.
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But only the Always-On nodes can forward a message. Every Always-On node acts as a repeater in the mesh and is able to forward a message from one node to another in the mesh. The mesh is the key to Z-Wave reliability. And they wondered why the connection to the lock was unreliable when the hub was at the far end of the building! Z-Wave relies on Always-On (110VAC powered) nodes to build a “mesh” network. I can’t tell you how many people I’ve worked with that had a door lock and a hub and nothing else, maybe a battery powered thermostat. Remember that if you have 60 Z-Wave devices and you poll each one once/min then you are polling once/second and the network is hammered! So only poll a couple of nodes! 2. If you have some older switches but they’re not that important to instantly know their state has changed, you can still poll them but no more than once every few minutes. So the primary way to minimize polling is to replace the few devices in your Smart Home that trigger an event (or SmartApp or Magic or whatever your hub calls it) with one that will instantly send an update. But now that the patent has expired, you can get light switches that do send a report immediately when their state has changed. Several manufacturers found ways to get around this or they licensed the patent. The patent forced many light switch manufacturers to not send a message when you flipped the switch. Polling used to be the only way to get around a patent that fortunately expired in February 2016. Collisions slow everything down just like rubber-necking on the highway. If the network is busy, every device that needs to send a message has to wait its turn and then compete (and often collide) with all that polling traffic. Z-Wave and most other wireless networks work best when the network is highly available. They figure Z-Wave is a high speed network so they can just poll a light switch every 3 seconds and then react to any change in the switch. This is probably THE number one mistake new users of Z-Wave make. As a Z-Wave expert I’ve built and rebuilt hundreds of Z-Wave networks and have come up with a few habits to make Z-Wave networks more reliable. You press a button on your phone and 1… 2… 3… and then finally a light comes on or maybe it doesn’t come on at all! Another common problem is when a battery powered sensor was updating the temperature last week and this week it just doesn’t seem to be sending updates anymore or at best sporadically. But maybe things are not working quite as well as you expect. You have a Smart Home using Z-Wave as a wireless technology for all these Internet of Things (IoT) devices to communicate with each other.