When is a site considered large?
If you are working on a site that has more than 25-30 devices paired to the gateway or that has more than one gateway/network present, we consider that a large site. When you have a lot of connected devices in your install you can have a lot of background traffic that causes things to start slowing down and ultimately failing with their default parameters left in place.
We've collated some guidelines from our experience to help you manage larger sites and ensure reliable operation of your Nero system.
Manage energy reporting more tightly
By default Nero devices are configured to send an energy report every 5 minutes and when there is more than 10% change in the energy reading. For most networks this is fine however on larger networks, especially those with energy monitoring on GPOs, this can result in a huge number of unnecessary reports for minor values. We recommend disabling change reporting on large sites and relying instead of periodic reports. The example below sets the periodic report to 60 seconds.
- Parameter 40 - 1 Byte DEC - 0 (disable change reports)
- Parameter 42 - 2 Byte DEC - 60 (send period reports every 60 seconds)
Split your system into multiple network
If you have a large property the wireless mesh can often have trouble reaching all areas reliably. While the mesh will calculate the most efficient routes through the system it may not be able to reach the far edges without delays and depending on a combination of weather your building materials it may not reliably reach those devices at the extremes.
We generally recommend that for most standard homes each floor has its own gateway and is set up as their own system. When all systems are working reliably they can then be synchronised over the network so the user only needs to connect to one of them.
For long homes, such as older terraces, it may be most effective to split the front half and back half into separate systems to reduce the maximum number of mesh hops that each command is required to take.
Ensure that scenes with large numbers of devices run smoothly
When controlling a lot of devices the Z-Wave modem uses a "queue" to ensure that every command is sent. This queue has a maximum size however and if you try to control too many devices at once you are likely to exhaust it, meaning some devices won't be controlled.
To allow for the queue to empty before adding more commands you can configure your scene to wait just a moment before sending the next batch of commands. We recommend adding a 1 second delay between every 4 devices and set the energy reporting as above.