Plan your Z-Wave range
before you buy more devices.

Typical indoor range is 20–30 m with a clear path, and noticeably less through walls — concrete especially. Z-Wave runs sub-GHz (868.4 MHz in the EU, 908.4 MHz in the US), so it penetrates building materials better than 2.4 GHz WiFi or Zigbee, but every wall still costs signal. Newer 700- and 800-series chips reach further than the older 500-series, and because Z-Wave is a mesh, mains-powered devices relay for each other — total network coverage is bigger than any single link. The planner models all of this on your actual floorplan instead of guessing from a spec-sheet number.

Only mains-powered devices repeat: smart plugs, in-wall dimmers and switches, wired relay modules, and dedicated range extenders like the Aeotec Range Extender 7 or Ring Alarm Range Extender. Battery-powered devices — door/window sensors, motion sensors, most locks — sleep to preserve battery and never route traffic for other devices. This is the most common Z-Wave planning mistake: a hallway full of battery sensors adds zero mesh backbone. In the planner, you place the controller plus your mains-powered repeaters, because those are the only nodes that actually extend coverage.

Usually a routing problem, not a broken device. The typical causes: the device sits at the edge of range with no mains-powered repeater between it and the controller; the signal has to cross too many walls (concrete and brick are the worst offenders); or the route needs more than 4 hops — Z-Wave hard-caps routes at 4 hops from controller to device, so a long chain of repeaters cannot save a placement that is simply too far away. Plotting your floorplan in the planner shows where the coverage contour ends and where one well-placed plug or extender closes the gap.

Per hop, Z-Wave usually wins indoors: its sub-GHz signal (868/908 MHz) penetrates walls better than Zigbee's 2.4 GHz, so a single link crosses more rooms. Zigbee counters with topology: it supports far more devices per network and does not share Z-Wave's 4-hop route limit, so a dense Zigbee mesh can sprawl further overall. In practice the answer depends on your building and how many mains-powered repeaters each mesh has — which is exactly what you can compare by planning the same floorplan in both the Z-Wave and Zigbee modes of this tool.

Z-Wave is region-locked by radio law: 868.4 MHz in Europe, 908.4 MHz in North America (other regions have their own allocations). Devices from the wrong region will not join your controller. The planner has a band selector — 868 MHz EU or 908 MHz US — and models propagation at the frequency you actually run, though in practice the two behave very similarly through walls.

The engine runs the COST-231 multi-wall model: free-space path loss at your selected sub-GHz frequency plus the summed attenuation of every wall the signal crosses, by material. Because sub-GHz penetrates better than 2.4 GHz, per-material wall losses are scaled to ×0.6 of their 2.4 GHz values. Expect predictions within a ±6–10 dB envelope of reality — enough to decide where a repeater goes and whether the garage will be a dead spot, not a substitute for checking the mesh after installation. The full methodology is on the accuracy page.