Phase 2: expanding the network - adding more radiators

Satisfied with the operation of my zwave network in the living room I purchased two more radiator valves in order to extend the network into neighbouring rooms.

Unfortunately, the signal from the raspberry pi was not strong enough to reach the office TRV from the living room. I moved the rPi into the side room and still it could not connect and it stopped reaching the remotest of the TRVs in the living room (approx 11m away).

The Razberry daughter card did not seem to be up to the job of getting the signal to extend beyond a single room in my house. Perhaps if the walls weren't so solid I may have had more luck, but I certainly was not the only one with issues as reviews were not always favourable regarding reported range versus the actual range.

The best solution would probably have been to add an aerial, which is what several people had successfully tried but I was not confident that my soldering skills were up to the job. Instead I thought I would try adding signal boosters in the form of zwave sockets. This is the approach that HeatGenius take.

Smart plugs extend the range of Heat Genius components in large homes

I purchased this smart socket from Aeon,

It extended the range slightly, but still not satisfactorily. I had similar results from a second socket from TKB:

I spent a lot of time moving my raspberry pi and these sockets about the house trying to figure out whether I would ever be able to get a reliable network. This involved much including/excluding of the sockets and extension cables (in order to position the sockets in line of sight).

Moving the sockets further and further from the raspberry pi would eventually result in the 'update' command failing in the Expert UI routing table. However, at this point the switches were still reachable from the UI and could be turned on/off. It looked like they were still able to operate as switches, but were unable to route.

There were messages in the server log indicating that neighbour reports were failing but I could not see why and the reports were not at a low enough level to glean any useful information.

I was getting ready to throw in the towel at this point, which was a shame as I had already invested quite a bit of time in designing the software and I liked what the ZWay server had to offer.

But based on this amazon review of a dedicated zwave repeater from Aeon:

I decided to have one final stab at the problem and purchased one for myself.

This made a huge difference and I was able to get two more rooms added to my network.

UPDATE June 2017: I ended up purchasing three of these range extenders and re-positioned my raspberry pi upstairs pretty central in the house. Also, I now have a mains powered switch for the boiler control and another for the hot water pump. The network has been working reliably for over six months and reaches TRVs at both ends of my house. End to end my house is about 22 metres and the routing table shows that multiple hops are required for some nodes: