C7 to C8 Migration Z-Wave Challenges

I’m having very similar issues. I’m extremely frustrated. Lots of weird things going on.

The latest update hasn’t fixed anything either.

Anyone have any other suggestions here? Both Z-Wave and Zigbee are trash since I migrated a few weeks ago.

To be fair many people have migrated from the C7 to the C8 without issue.

Unfortunately that has not been my experience. I have had problems with both z-wave and zigbee ever since I migrated maybe 6 weeks ago. Based on my limited knowledge there's something not right about both implementations on the C8. Whether it's a platform issue that can be fixed or a chipset issue that is beyond HE's control or a handful of devices that just will not make the transition I don't know, but the C8 has not been a reliable platform for me. Fortunately these issues don't affect most people but for me the C8 migration has been disappointing.

I continue to hope that the Hubitat team will be able to address both issues and make things right. In the mean time I have been migrating critical workloads back to the C7.

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It’s threads like this that keep me from upgrading. I shied away from the C7 after witnessing all the early adopter issues, and looks like I may shy away from the C8 for a while longer as well. My C5 is rock solid and I have no particular reason to upgrade other than the temptation to have the newest thing…

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Same for me - the update did not help. I see no errors. Z-wave routes are all fine. Devices would work one moment and 5 minutes later, some devices are "stuck". Only to start working 10 minutes later. This causes havoc with automation. Simple things like motion sensors turning on lights work 1 out of 3 times. Other times it would work 3 out of 3 times. I have forgotten that these automations even exist until the upgrade to the C8.
Other times, not even a normal hub reboot would bring Z-wave devices back and I have to disconnect power from the hub to get them working again.
I'm staring to sound like a broken record. I'm sorry.
I am wondering if I should go back to the C7, but I have so many other more fun things to do this weekend. I was blinded by the "external antenna" and "better Z-wave coverage". spin I understand that that is the only difference between the C7 and C8, so in my experience, as things stand now, it was a waste of time and money. I'm sorry to say this because I love the Hubitat hubs.

I certainly understand that sentiment. In fairness to the good people at Hubitat, though, what you're hearing from here are the people with problems (including me by the way). There are lots of people who have had a clean migration experience and aren't posting about it.

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The migration experience was pretty painless, except for a few minor issues, which were quickly resolved after the C8 was released. The problem lies with what followed. I am convinced there is an issue with Z-wave. Considering what people post on the forum, it appears that most unresolved issues people have with the C8 relate to Z-wave.

I think all the people having Zigbee problems MIGHT disagree with you :). But point taken.

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What is the name of the user driver you used for the Leviton DZPD3-2BW?

My sense w/out doing an actual count is that folks w/Zigbee issues have been the most common. Again, just my sense of things over the past couple of weeks, and my wife usually begs to differ w/me. :wink:

Portions of my z-wave mesh stopped responding randomly sometime late this afternoon. No apparent cause. One motion detector took about 10 seconds to active lights. Another motion sensor clearly indicated from the LED that it detected motion yet no response from hub, Ring security keypad also offline. Did a shut down, power down, restart... had to pull the batteries from at least one motion sensor to get it to respond again.

And this morning... I have a test installation of a single C8, an Aeotec repeater, a ring keypad, and a contact sensor... all in close proximity. All working yesterday, ring keypad offline this morning. No changes, no spammy devices (that I can tell).

My experience for the migration - everything went smooth, but did it? No, can’t add Zigbee devices, devices drop off, Z-wave got worse over time.

Started a C8 from scratch, seems pretty solid so far - adding is no problem, no drop offs, Z-wave is responsive.

For whatever reason, the migration doesn’t seem to work right. I suspect if you compare new setups vs migrated hubs you’ll see a difference.

I'm finding that after migration Z Wave is improving over a much longer period of time than I expected. I recall Brian mentioning that things would settle after about 3 days. I'm finding that Z Wave routes are continuing to improve some two weeks later. My current 'uptime' is 12 days and I'll leave it as long as possible before updating/rebooting. Just to be clear, everything worked great immediately after migration, it's just that it's still improving now.

Prior to migration 29-31 of 45 devices were direct with RSSI's ranging from 17 to 50. 3 days after migration about 38 of 45 devices were direct with RSSI's a bit lower ranging from 8 to mid 30's.

At that point I decided to switch out the Z Wave antenna to see if the remaining devices would connect directly (just for giggles). Initially the direct routes were the same but the RSSI's were all higher (15 ish to mid 40's)

What I'm seeing now is that very slowly, the direct routes have continued to improve, I'm currently seeing 42 of 45 direct. I had one device that seemed to act as some kind of 'mega repeater' as it's been repeating for 10 devices in all directions. That has slowly been dropping devices in favour of those devices connecting directly. When I look at the mesh details app now, the repeated routes actually make sense for the first time.

My thoughts are that I could've/should've left the stock antenna alone at the 3 day mark rather than swap it for the 5dBi one. I was a bit hasty and think that the routes may have continued to improve regardless over time.

Likely so. But there are still issues even on C8s that never migrated.

But still a pattern.

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FWIW I only have 18 z-wave devices in a relatively small house. It took a little while, but since I migrated from my C-5 to the C-8, all but one are direct. The sole remaining hold-out is a Fibaro motion sensor in my kitchen. It's two feet from one extender, and there's a second extender within line-of-sight between it and the hub. But it insists on routing through an extender that's in the living room, which is as far from the hub as it can get. I do not understand how z-wave decides to route. I'm considering starting to slowly pull some of the extenders that aren't doing anything else.

Zigbee is a different story for a different thread.

I think one of the problems is we can't see the radio frequency propagation from these devices. So a device that is physically close may be in a RF blind spot of the device. The RF propagation may also depend on the orientation of the device (possible the orientation of the sender and the orientation of the receiver).

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Same experience here, things have improved slowly but surely. I have run a few individual repairs on devices that had funny routes.

I believe that the three days comment was more about routes populating fully in the route column (which can show up empty after a migration), than Z-wave being done w/actual routing changes by then. That can be a much longer process, similar to when you add a Z-Wave repeater to your mesh and it can take weeks for it to pick up devices routing through it.

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Leviton Z-Wave Plus Dimmer from jtp10181 it is in the Package Manager library if that helps.

Hubitat/leviton-zwave-dimmer.groovy at main · jtp10181/Hubitat · GitHub

I will also add that switching my main lighting routines over from RM to RL has offered considerable improvements on the reliability side. I haven't dug in enough to know (someone here will likely chime in) but I believe RL is a culmination of many other apps that seems to handle the logic much better and more consistently. There is also the ability to force on/off commands where needed along with a whole host of other possibilties.

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