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    Interface Upgrade Advice Needed

    This has been asked and answered already I'm sure, but I need some advice from some of you that have "been there and done that" to make this process smoother. I am currently running with a SmartStick+ attached to my server. I added a big addition to the house this past year, and although the server/stick is optimally placed, I have decided to split the house with 2 z-nets for the best reception. They will both be using the wired interface.

    My question(s) are: I've read that splitting the z-nets into 2 separate networks in this situation is best and that's what I've decided to do. Is this indeed best? If so, should I back up the network and restore to one z-net, then remove the devices that I plan to add to the second z-net. After that, restore the network to the second z-net and remove the devices I've added to the first? Completely different method maybe? Advice is certainly appreciated.

    On a side note: I'm not completely sane, so I will remove every single device from the ZStick+, create 2 new networks, and re-add them that way. This is actually my first inclination. It would be a monumental task, but that's just how I roll

    #2
    Anyone?

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      #3
      I started out with a single Ztroller in 2014. I struggled to keep the network mesh healthy enough to reliably control things throughout my house and a couple of detached buildings. This was before Z-Wave plus. I bought my first Z-Net as a beta release. It was an improvement, because I could mount it up high in almost the center of all the devices. It was still prone to errors and failed commands.

      When I looked at adding another controller and how a secondary controller worked, I chose to add another as a new and separate network. I added it to my “shed”. A building about 50 feet from my house. I excluded nodes that were in my shed from the primary controller and included them in the new controller one by one. I filtered Events on those devices as I moved each one so that I could fix them as I moved Devices. If the Events are filtered prior to excluding the Device, it will remain correct even after Devices are excluded. There were a total of about 12 devices that got moved. That worked so well that I added a third controller in the furthest corner of my garage. Again, I moved the nodes one by one. By then I had about 70 devices.

      While moving them one at a time was a little tedious, I would still do it the same way. It allowed me to fix my Events as I moved Devices. With three controllers, failed commands and errors were vanishingly rare. As the number of devices grew, I added them to the nearest controller.

      As my network grew, my primary controller had close to 100 Devices. We wanted to move from Aeotec Minimotes to the Remotec ZRC-90US and found that they would fail inclusion on a controller with more than 60 or so nodes. This was a problem in their design. I added a fourth controller. Over time I have slowly moved devices and spread them across controllers such that the busiest controller has less than 60 nodes. In my experience, that seems to be a practical limit. Locks also seem to have a problem wit busy controllers, though that can be due to the number of devices and/or how chatty the devices are. Now at 135 Z-Wave devices, the network remains reliable other than a bout of excessive traffic I had to fight last month. I wrote about that process here.

      Z-Wave still remains a bit of a black art, but I would still go with separate networks instead of secondary controllers. I wonder about RF collisions with all of the devices spread across different networks. A secondary controller might be able to manage that better, but I have only read a few posts from people who had success adding a secondary controller. YMMV.
      HS4 Pro, 4.2.19.0 Windows 10 pro, Supermicro LP Xeon

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        #4
        Thank you so much for that Randy. Just reading that helps me better understand what I'm about to do and better prepare for it. I may go ahead and order a third z-net also, as my network seems to have grown at roughly the same rate as yours and will probably progress the same as well. Ideas to help prepare for the future are invaluable, so I appreciate that. Separate networks seemed like the way to go after scraping through previous posts, but the information is either so scattered or dated I was very hesitant to conclude that I was making an informed decision. Thanks for sharing the link also. I'll give it a read. Thanks again and happy new year!

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