All ZWAVE stopped Working - Heating Down - its 3am and its getting cold

Just as an FYI - Hubitat backups do not include radio-paired devices.

Uggggghhh

You can try and justify why you think it is OK all you want, but consumer home automation hubs can not guarantee 99.99% uptime. They are not appropriate fits for life/security management systems or critical systems that could cause large damage if they fail (like heating in the winter).

Do what you want - your house, your decision. Just don't come crying to anyone if the heat doesn't come on and your water pipes freeze because you didn't have a more reliable fallback system.

For example, what happens if last night's issue happened while no one was home (you are on holiday or other)?

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As someone who uses Hubitat to control my HVAC system, I feel like I need to chime in on this thread. I don't agree with those that are saying Hubitat is too unreliable to use for HVAC. I do agree with those that are saying HVAC is mission-critical so the system must be designed to go to an acceptable state in the presence of the failure of individual devices or in the presence of a complete Hubitat failure. States where heating is completely off for long periods are not acceptable states. Neither are states where heating or cooling run constantly.

In the automotive industry, we use Failure Mode Effects Analysis (FMEA), a tool that I believe originated in the Aerospace industry, to anticipate failures that might happen, systematically think through what the impact would be, and take actions where appropriate to mitigate any potential severe impacts. The same type of analysis is needed here.

My heating system is a zoned forced air system. I do something similar to what neonturbo proposed, having one of my thermostats wired to the furnace in parallel with the ZWave relays that normally command the furnace. The zone dampers are set to open if they do not receive any signal for awhile. Therefore, if Hubitat completely stopped, the system would function like a non-zoned system. I have other features in the software for dealing with other types of failures, such as intermittent missed messages or individual thermostats going offline.

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@JasonJoel What can I say - I am on the bleeding edge and an enteral optimist :slight_smile:
Thank you for your contribution.

As for the away ....

I am pretty sure you did not mean to come across as harsh as it read :slight_smile:

Last night, as described in the thread above, there were other things I could have done had I been awake enough, we got a new puppy two days ago, let's just say, not conducive to a good nights sleep.

But I will try very hard not to come crying to anyone :slight_smile:

As far as absence form the house - I can only dream !!!!!! I have been shielded in the house since all the Covid started so ironically saw this a great opportunity to switch to a new HA system, especially as the total lockdown has just been extended until end of March.

I have been blessed with 100% Heating and Hot Water reliability uptime for 6 years so I suspect I got complacent.

This is a good opportunity to implement the risk mitigation and service continuity plans outlined above.

With a total HA failover to Zwave direct association between the Boiler controller and centralised Thermostat set to 16C and the Holiday mode of HE setting every TRV to 16C, then if HE goes offline the heating will continue to operate.

By the time I have added a 2nd HE, on order, to provide oversight, I will have a fairly robust system, especially as they will be on UPSs that should cover the HE's for at least a week.

Then all I have to worry about in my absence is the boiler breakdown, loss of Gas supply or loss of Electric supply.

But they happen while I am away a failed HA/HE is going to be the least of my concerns.

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Eh, doesn't sound harsh to me. I see multiple times a year where someone is doing something ill advised, it all goes wrong, and they come pounding the pulpit about how "your crappy system damaged my home!!!!".

Not saying that is what you were doing, but that is why I don't spend a lot of time worrying about people's feelings if they are doing something seemingly risky.

And if they are not in the end (other mitigations, etc, they didn't mention) then the comment doesn't apply to them so there should be no offense. :slight_smile:

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I had an issue where intermittently the heating would not turn off at night.
I ended up putting in additional rules to mitigate it from happening.
Last week I was looking at the rule just to see if there was something wrong with it and bang there it was. Schoolboy error.
Corrected it and everything has been fine since.
All I'm saying it is easy to blame something else for issues as I'm sure you are like me and never make mistakes.

In the OP's case the situation was much more drastic than mine but all I'm saying is it may not always be the hubs fault.

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That's what I tell my kids... In reality I wish that were true. Lol

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I had a similar issue to this though not related to HVAC. I have a webcore piston I have been building to shutdown my 3D Printer when it is done. Though everytime it ran it would shutdown early ( would just notify currently, I didn't have the shutdown switch put in yet). I copied the piston from my washing machine as they use the same device (power monitoring). Turns out I had the washing machine still as the device it was looking at for power consumption. Made me feel like an idiot when I realized it was looking at the wrong device. Though, especially when copying logic, its an easy mistake to make. After that, it was working as intended and it put in the command to shutdown when power drops below a certain level, after a certain time interval.

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I have certainly made quite few of those kind of goof ups that have had me slapping my forehead.

But in this instance two issues had me stopped in my tracks.

One was a long standing bug that I uncovered in the Rules for Thermostats, will be fixed in next release

The other was an unknown feature of the ZWAVE just locking up and blocking all ZWAVE traffic - that is what caused this minor panic :slight_smile:

Nice work finding the bug. That really helps us all in the long run. I have noticed with the newest release of Hubitat (probably the one your running too) some of my Zwave devices have been a little sluggish. I know they made major changes to Zwave from this firmware from the last large update.

For me the last large update worked great, but others not so much. I'm hoping I can get back to the snappier responses I was seeing on the last update, but with the better reliability of the new update. I'm sure it'll happen, it just takes time.

Also, if you have a C7 hub, it has the 700 series Zwave chip in it and it really is the first (and maybe still only) hub on the market offering it. So it's going to be a bit more experimental than the older hubs and chips with more users and hours on them.

Though as you mentioned in one of your earlier comments, the bleeding edge is always fun and new features are great to play with. As long as the wife is happy and the hub is doing what I want, then something to experiment with is always enjoyable!

Absolutely!!! - that is why I keep all the lighting on Hue Hubs - They have been absolutely solid and incredibly rare to have any issue. I am using some 16 Hue Motion Sensors that automate 95% of all lighting.

I have been using Indigo for 6 years, have worked through Vera, Homey, Homeseer and a few others looking for something that hits my core requirements.

Hubitat is the strongest contender by far - so much so I have just ordered a second one today.

Loving the Hubitat Community - all very helpful indeed

I've gone through the logs for the hub. The issue doesn't look like something it can recover from programmatically, and I couldn't hope to reproduce it, but 2.2.5 will have a location event and a main page red-font-in-your-face alert with instructions to shut hub down/unplug/wait/plug it back in.

If we find out more about root cause, I'll post here.

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@gopher.ny Thank you for the update.

These things happen and appreciate you guys looking at it.

Once I get the second HE - I'll mesh and see if I can work out a way to do a hard reboot - power off wait restart using zigbee sockets once every 24 hours - and hopefully that will keep the issue at bay until resolved.

Again many thanks, appreciated.

@habitat
Would this do the job of rebooting for you?

I’ll give it a go thanks!

It looks like a shutdown, turn off power is required, I can put the HEs on a zigbee/zwave switch, so I need to find a way to set a rule say at 12:05 shutdown and on the 2nd HE turn off the switch to the 1st, wait 10 seconds and turn back on.

Then repeat for the 2nd one.

Newbie needs some help relative to the TH3060ZW integration. I'm confused or else messed this up on my new C7. Dumped Wink for obvious reasons and went to C7. The stat worked fine in Wink and I think it used to work ok into C7. But no longer, perhaps broken in an update? Unsure. The Dashboard seems to work allowing be to change setpoint, etc. But that is never carried out at the thermostat itself nor correct values it reads show back into Dashboard. I deleted and re-connected the thermostat via Zwave on Hubitat and the thermostat. No change.

Confused about using Generic, the Contoller driver, or the T6 one many say also works fine with the basic unit I have. What should I be looking for to get this working again. A few screen captures:

Thank you to anyone who can help.

Note I mistyped the product number. It is in fact the TH8320ZW Honeywell thermostat which is no longer a current product of theirs.

This is a z-wave thermostat (not z-wave+). The only built-in driver that might work with it is "Generic Z-Wave Thermostat". If you change drivers, be sure to click "Configure" after doing so.

And I would first make sure the thermostat works from the device page before getting it to work in a Dashboard.

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