All my Leviton DZPD3 Dimmers Have Died

I have about 20 Z-Wave devices of various brands and 5 Leviton DZPD3 plug-in dimmers.

This evening I noticed many of my devices had the wrong dim level. I went to habitat device page(s) and every DZPD3 had a dim level set 10. I couldn't change the dim level from the device settings page on any of them. If I set Dim to 90%, it stops at 10%. The only way to bring them back to life was to exclude them, do a factory reset on each module, then include them again. That fixed every single one of them.

Of course, this was a lengthy painful process as these devices were part of a lot of Machine Rules that I had to modify before excluding them. I also have Leviton brand Wall dimmers and those were not affected and continue to work fine.

What happened here? What would kill all 5 modules of this specific brand/model. I will try to contact Leviton support tomorrow. Could some faulty command by Habitat be sent out to do this?

I'm at a loss to figure this out- and cringe to think of this happening again.

Shut down your hub from the setting menu. Unplug the power to the hub from the wall (not the hub) Wait 20 mins and power back up to see if they come back on line.

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I have about 10 Leviton VRPD3-1LW. These are really old ( maybe 2014 or 2015) but give me no issues at all.

If the shutdown does nothing, before excluding I would load a driver named "Clean Device" you should be able to find it on the Hubitat user drivers page (I don't recall where that is).
The driver will allow you to delete all the Hub stored configuration data.

Replace the current driver with the "Clean Device" driver. Clear the status etc. Return to you original driver.

I will try the Clean Device driver when it happens again. I'm wondering though is if it's in the driver. All of these have the "Generic Z-Wave CentralScene Dimmer". I will try to change this on a few of them to see if this is the issue.

Do the power down and pull first to make sure it was something simple like the z-wave radio in HE crashed...

Okay did the 20 min power down. It usually take a few days for all the dimmers to die. I will report back when it happens again.

@JoeJ
Can you post a screen shot of your z-wave details page? Also what firmware revision are the switches using?

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I don't know how to view the firmware version on these switches. Here is the Z-Wave Details page.
Image1



The ones that die simultaneously are x2C, x2D, x2E, x2F, x31

I don't know if the clean driver will help but its an easy and safe to try.

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I will definitely try that when they go out again.

I had one of the dw6hd Leviton's freeze on me and not respond. I learned that you can pull up on the bottom of the dimmer bar and it lifts up, then you lift it just a bit more and it will air gap the dimmer. That cuts the power from the device and reboots. So if you have wall installed switches that do this that worked for me on that one.

Yea, I know about the air gap. Unfortunately, my DZ6HD's don't have this problem as well as my Aeotecs, Zooz, and Jasco Devices.

So strange of a problem...

Yea, Telling Leviton about the problem- they blame the hub.
I think they're right- I mean 5 devices of the same brand/model all bought at different times suddenly all go belly up at the same time? The odds of that are pretty high.

This happened to me today as I was trying to update the firmware in one of my DZPD3's. However, it didn't happen in the one I was attempting to update. I noticed something I hadn't noticed before with one of them. I had turned it on using the button on the front. I was watching the z-wave traffic with my zniffer. The device sent out a Hail after the button was pressed but Hubitat didn't request the state of the device after that. I found that strange. So I pressed it again and sure enough I noticed that the state wasn't being updated in Hubitat's device. I normally don't press the buttons so it's not something I've ever noticed. I was using the default assigned driver which is "Generic Z-Wave CentralScene Dimmer". I looked at the logs and sure enough it stated "skip: Hail()". As I kept pressing the button on the front it somehow got into the very low dimmer state and nothing I could do would reset it to make it raise from that minimum.

I say this all to ask a question. Do any of you use the buttons on the DZPD3 to turn it on and off?

I haven't had any problems with any of mine until this moment messing with the button to turn it on and off.

Looking at the zniffer logs I don't believe my particular problem was caused by Hubitat. There was no traffic from my C-7 to the device when the problem occurred. I wonder if pressing the button several times quickly somehow put the device in a strange state which only excluding and resetting resolved.

In any case I am now experimenting with using the system driver "Leviton DZ6HD Z-Wave Dimmer" as I read the DZPD3's dimming engine is the same as the DZ6HD. I will say that the state is now updated correctly in Hubitat when I press the button.

If they are in fact physically dead, there is no way Hubitat or any other hub could do that.

They're not physically dead. I can bring mine back to life by excluding it, doing a factory reset, and then include it again. Worst thing is I usually wind up with at least one ghost and we all now what pain that is to remove.

Exactly what I'm seeing- a different DZPD3 fails with the 10% dim hang when messing with another device. In my case, all 5 DZPD3's failed. I did press some of the buttons during setup, so sounds like that's what triggered the problem. I also have seen three "skip: Hail( )" entries in the log as you mentioned.

I haven't seen the problem in about a week. Perhaps maybe because I'm pretty much setup now and don't mess with them anymore.

Normally, I don't use the front button on any of mine, since for example, the table lamp plug-in is in the AC outlet behind the couch.

BTW I noticed in Dashboard that only the DZPD3's display zero dim level when turning them off. All other devices I have when turned off maintains their last dim settings in the GUI.

Is the firmware up to date in all switches? I only ever see that or something causing too much chatter on a mesh crashing it like that.