Potentially useful tip when adding Zwave devices

As you might have seen in other threads in this section, I have had difficulty with migrating from a Zooz stick to ZMatter on my eisy, and essentially reinstalled all my Zwave devices manually. One particularly difficult part was adding back Weiser locks. I have 5 of them, plus a spare that I use for testing. Doing the add Zwave device routine and pressing the button on the lock would often only add a single generic device node, or two nodes. This might vary for other locks but a proper add of a Weiser lock will usually give 5 or 6 nodes (depending on if it's a Smartcode 10 or Smartcode 620). In the US, these are often known by the Kwikset name. Each time I needed to do a Zwave exclude and retry the add. Bringing the lock closer to the controller would improve chances of success, but still usually required multiple retries. Taking the lock off the door isn't exactly fun either. In Zwave discussions on the forum, I would often see a suggestion to bring the device closer to the controller, so it wasn't just me either.

In observing the add process, it's the "interview" process that seems to be the failure point. In checking out settings under the "Z-Wave" menu, I noticed Network -> Interview Timeout. So I bumped it up to the maximum of 3 minutes, and tried the Nth add of a lock that wasn't adding correctly for over an hour. Poof, added perfectly on the first try! There were short pauses during the interview progress indication, but it carried on to completion. And this lock was sitting on my desk to be closer to the controller. Well I had one last lock to add (of the five, the first two added back in-place, the third by bringing it close, and then the frustrating one I just described). This last lock is the farthest away, on a separate garage behind the house. I used the UD Mobile feature to go out, exclude it, and add it back. Came back in the house to see the 6 nodes added perfectly, on first try! Dumb luck? Twice?

When thinking about the notion of bringing the device closer for adding it, the only real justification for that seems to be to reduce the need to go through the mesh network, which can only add delays. It would seem that making the timeout delay more tolerant is a much easier way of doing this.

Let me know what you think, and if you do try this yourself, how it works out.