Curious about Z-Wave Long Range (Z-Wave LR) on your Hubitat Elevation hub? Z-Wave LR is an advancement beyond traditional Z-Wave, offering:
Currently, Z-Wave LR is supported only in the US region. (The Z-Wave Alliance has announced plans to extend this feature to other regions in the future.)
Z-Wave LR requires a Hubitat Elevation hub model C-8 or newer running at least platform version 2.3.9.
Z-Wave LR requires the use of Z-Wave SmartStart for inclusion. Follow the process on the Add Device page under How to Add a Z-Wave LR Device to do so.
All generations of Z-Wave are backwards compatible, and devices that support Z-Wave LR can still be included as traditional Z-Wave nodes if you choose. Additionally, while Z-Wave LR requires the use of SmartStart, this does not mean that all SmartStart devices support Z-Wave LR. SmartStart predates Z-Wave LR and can also be found on many Z-Wave Plus (and Z-Wave Plus V2) devices. Z-Wave nodes included via SmartStart will be added as traditional Z-Wave nodes if the device or hub does not support LR mode (or if a different "boot mode" is manually selected when adding the device to the SmartStart list on the hub).
The device manual or packaging should indicate if a device supports Z-Wave LR if you are not sure. Often, you will see a "Z-Wave Plus LR" logo on the device or packaging. (Z-Wave LR support is possible on Z-Wave 700-series devices but was not commonly implemented until 800-series products, which are still rather new as of the time of this writing. Many 500-series devices are still widely available as well, which do not support LR.)
As mentioned above, Z-Wave has traditionally operated as a mesh network. This means that not all devices need to be in direct range of your hub. Instead, signal could "hop" through one or more repeaters on the way to the device or back to the hub. Building a solid mesh network is important for traditional Z-Wave networks. See How to Build a Solid Z-Wave Mesh for more tips.
Z-Wave LR eliminates the mesh network in favor of a star (or hub-and-spoke) topology, where all nodes communicate directly to the hub. This eliminates the use of repeaters or the need to worry about building your mesh — every Z-Wave LR device communicates directly to the hub.
As a side effect of these changes, it should be noted that Z-Wave LR devices added as LR nodes will not act as repeaters for traditional Z-Wave devices on your network. Thus, if you have a network consisting largely of traditional Z-Wave devices, you may still wish to include at least some of your mains-powered devices as traditional Z-Wave nodes rather than as LR nodes in order to provide repeaters to build a good mesh network for these devices.
Both traditional Z-Wave nodes and Z-Wave LR nodes can operate side-by-side on the same hub; there is no need to choose one or the other.
As a simple example, a Hubitat Elevation hub operating a Z-Wave LR network with both traditional and LR nodes might look like:
Here, "Z-Wave" means traditional Z-Wave, and "LR" means Z-Wave Long Range. The thick line denotes a Z-Wave LR connection, while a regular line denotes a traditional Z-Wave connection. Z-Wave LR devices do not participate in traditional Z-Wave mesh routing.
Curious to know more technical information? Here are some interesting facts and comparisons for users familiar with traditional Z-Wave. If you don't want to dig in this far, you do not need to know these details for regular use of the hub.
0x0100 (or 256) is an LR node. Any node less than 0x00FF (or 255, though 0x00E8 or 232 is the highest you are likely to see assigned) is a traditional node. LR nodes are also annotated with "LR" in the node ID column.