I'm ready to throw this system out the door (range extenders do not work)

I have a ring system that covers a small office, and now our warehouse.

The office area works fine. The setup is:

Ring Hub–/Room-Range Extender/Warehouse-Range Extender

The devices in the Warehouse are connecting (per ring support) back to the first range extender rather than the range extender 10 feet away from them.

The app shows week signal and the keypad barely works. If I bring the devices into the same room as the ring hub, they all work fine, take them away to next to the range extender and they are all broken.

I know Z-Wave likes to be setup next to the device it’s going to be operating on, and I’ve done that… but still I’m having issues where the device is not using the range extender.

Help?!

Hi @mhoppes. Getting devices to connect to a specific Range Extender can be tricky. That’s because there isn’t a way to choose what device connects where. Instead, our devices choose the path of least resistance. I’ll explain how they do this. Every 90 minutes, the Base Station sends out a signal known as a “heartbeat” to all of the sensors. The sensors then send a signal back. This heartbeat will update the sensors status and its connection to the Base Station.

For example, you have Contact Sensor #1 with a weak connection to the Base Station. 10 ft away, you have Range Extender #2, with a good connection to the Base Station. Contact Sensor #1 performs a heartbeat and the Base Station tells it to find a better connection. Contact Sensor #1 will now connect to Range Extender #2, then to the Base Station. But after that connection has been made, Contact Sensor #1 is now reporting an even weaker signal. The Base Station will tell Contact Sensor #1 to disconnect from Range Extender #2 and revert back to its original connection, because it was a less weak connection. 90 minutes later, it will do this all over again.

I know this is a lot of information to digest, but this is essentially how the Z-wave system in the Ring Alarm works. The way to correct this is by moving your Range Extender closer to the Base Station or moving the Base Station closer to the Range Extender. There are a lot of things happening in the environment that we cannot see. These things could be causing wireless interference, and ultimately impacting the signal of your wireless sensors. The best practices are to put your Base Station in a central location, free from obstruction and away from any other wireless devices. This gives it the best communication with all of your equipment. I hope this information helps.

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I get that - but the range extender is literally 10 feet from the sensor, while the base station is 2 walls and 2 rooms away. There’s no way the base station should have a better connection than through the range extender.

Hey @mhoppes. Chiming in for Tom here! If you’re still having this concern with your sensors being connected to the Range Extender > Base Station when the Range Extender is much closer, it would be best to reach out to our support team to have them take a deeper look into this. Please give our support team a call at one of the numbers available here. We’re taking additional steps to protect our team and help reduce the spread of COVID-19. This has resulted in longer than normal wait times. If you are outside of the US, please read our response to COVID-19 here to see how to contact support.