I have a customer in Toronto with a large home. The house has 3 Lutron Hubs (2 Smart Bridge Pros and one RA2). I have a few Zigbee devices and 4 Z-wave devices. I upgraded from a Hub C8 to a Hub C8 pro. At first it worked perfectly but then after a month Z-wave failed. I then bought a new hub from AARTECH which is where I bought the first one (It is the local company to buy these hubs in Canada). The new Hub Z-wave failed right out of the box.
Since I only had a few Z-wave devices I reset the Z-wave radio and that did nothing to help. I thought maybe there is some kind of interference here so I cut all power to the home and tried to pair a battery z-wave device. It did not work. I then grabbed a brand new C7 hub that I keep for emergencies and guess what>>>> It worked. So now I have a C8 Pro hub with a second C7 hub running Z-wave (this is crazy).
The odds of two Z-wave failures from the same supplier has me very concerned that Hubitat sent Aartech a bunch of bad hubs with failed Z-wave chips. I am worried that swapping the hub out again will do nothing to help my problem because it might just have another failed Z-wave chip. I do have C8 Pro hubs in other properties which were bought directly from Hubitat and they work great (so far).
POE would be the biggest concern (it's no good w/ few exceptions), but hopefully the stock brick and cable makes a difference... It seems the 8-series ZW radio is particularly finicky about power source.
This is insane but it worked. I moved back to the original brick and it worked!!!!
I have a hard time believing it. The brick I used is high power and I do use a different hub in other locations. I am going back to the included brick.
See this excellent thread for a discussion of power supplies and the C8, probably important for you to understand when using C8s in your customers homes.
The Hubitat C8 pro requires the full 2 AMPs of power to run the Z-wave radio. I will make sure that to use the supplied USB or something that I know will provide the full 2 AMPs.
The Z-wave radio definitely does not require 2 amps power supply, this would be 100 times higher power than the legal limit …
The problem is most probably related to noisy switching power supplies, that generate broad spectrum electromagnetic noise interfering with the sensitive Z-wave receiver.
Place the power supply brick as far away as possible from the Hub antennas.
The clip-on ferrite cores also help a lot :
That is interesting. In all cases the power supply was same the distance away. Maybe the multi stick I used had more noise. Now that I know the problem; I might experiment with a few USB solutions and cable lengths.
So it is the noise from the USB that caused the problem?
