Seems like everyone is having great success with HE but I can’t get mine working from one day to the next. One minute it seems like everything is working great and the next can’t control z-wave devices. One minute a light will instantaneously respond and then the next minute it will take 5 seconds for it to respond and then the next minute it stops responding all together. I tried all native drivers and custom drivers. I’ve removed every device and then added them back in the way suggested. I’ve done several z-wave repairs to try and resolve the issues. Sometimes it seems like everything is finally working and then everything starts acting wonky again. I can’t tell if I have a bad hub or z-wave/Zigbee controller, it’s something I’m doing wrong or I’m just expecting too much.
Question, do you have any Home energy monitors?
Good venting.
Your clues are:
- works as intended
- works slowly
- doesn't work at all.
You don't indicate if that cycles, but I assume so. That after not working, after some time or effort, it comes back.
Since you offer no other clues, one must extrapolate a list of everything that can do that.
- Hub defective
- USB stick defective
- Mesh defective.
Mesh, you can work to cure, everything else is a Hubitat Support issue. None of us here on the Community Forum can help with replacing components.
Mesh problems are dominated by interference and distance. Those are often interrelated because as distance increases, so does noise and eventually signal-to-noise goes below a threshold and the radio(s) can no longer hear each other. You can affect that by placement of your devices. How many other ZWave and Zigbee controllers do you have powered? Turn them off, they are chattering away on the same frequency as Hubitat.
You can verify that you have enough Always On Repeaters (AC powered) to extend your mesh to the furthest areas of your house. You'll want the distance between repeaters to be 20-30 feet, so that the repeaters can converse. There are limits to the abilities of repeaters, you can't have a hundred devices being repeated through one. The tiny micro-controllers within a device simply doesn't have enough memory for a full route table and thus get a limited subset.
For ZWave, do a ZWave repair at a time when there will be little else using your mesh. As the mesh is queried and then a new set of routes are deployed, it's entirely possible to sections of the mesh "flicker".
For Zigbee, power down your hub and smart Zigbee bulbs for 15 mins. Turn on the Hub, wait 15, then turn on the bulbs.
This is all generic info, because you've offered no specifics.
Do you have webCoRE loaded?
I'm very confused with this sentence.
I think he meant zigbee 
Edited to correct the typo. Thanks
Sorry for the troubles. Your expectations are fair. Based on your description it sounds like a possible mesh issue. Please see my PM for more details.
I do hope that your issue gets resolved. HE should be very responsive. BobbyD will get you straightened out. Sometimes the thing you least expect is the culprit. Please keep us updated.
No webCoRe
I'm sure you've tried, but if you can scale back your implementation into little "bits" or "zones", and make sure 1 bit is stable before adding another, you should find out what's causing your issues.
Like whats been mentioned above, sometimes it's not so obvious.
I'd suggest even starting by setting up just a single "type" of device - like contact sensors and making sure that they're stable and working with some Rules before adding more complexity.
Understand that I have no idea whether this is your first foray into home automation or not. 
I've found the Hubitat hub, extremely reliable but some of the devices I've tried to connect to it, less so. e.g. I had a very frustrating time with a Fibaro contact sensor that decided that it would signal OPEN when the magnet was closed and visa versa. In the end I gave up on it and went with a NeoCool sensor (Dome, I believe) and it's been no trouble at all.
Also it's been said in many places in this forum and it really is true that the support from both staff and users is 2nd to none.
I don't think it's a distance issue as every room has one or more AC powered z-wave devices. When building out the z-wave network I started from the devices closest to the hub and one by one worked my way out.
How close is your wireless router/access point to your HE hub?
That's pretty much the approach I took. Started with just z-wave closest to the hub and added one by one checking each one after its inclusion until all 61 z-wave devices have been included. At this point everything would be working fine. After that, maybe a day or two later I would do the same with the zigbee devices, then sometime after that, Hue and Ecobee, After that some of the core apps and Alexa.
At some point during the above process, things start to get wonky. Devices stop responding or don't have the right status. For example, just now I checked the Family Room Light (GE Z-Wave In-Wall Dimmer) which uses the standard Generic Z-Wave Dimmer driver, is in the same room as the hub, shows ACTIVE, On with level 25, yet the light is Off.
Been doing HA for quite some time. Prior to HE I was running openHAB, ST before that all the way back to PLC based devices. All the same devices worked flawlessly with openHAB, the platform has tons of flexibility but it was taking too much of my time so I decided to give HE a try figuring it would be a nice balance between ST an opebHAB.
The Hub is connected via cat5e to a dumb WAP/Switch which is connected to router/gateway (located in other part of house) via in-wall cat5e. The hub uses DHCP but has a static lease so it always comes up with the same IP.
Why do you ask?
It's about radio interference I suspect. Ensure that the Hub is a good distance away from the WAP/Switch, e.g. 6 ft or more
Two things come to mind reading about your setup.
That may be where a device was added that is misbehaving. Simply becuase it needs another reset or it's just now by cooincidence, a faulty device. Also, I'm not having issues with it as I previously suspected, but some still suspect the Ecobee Integration. Might be worth removing and rebooting as a test. Expect performance delays for up to 5 minutes after reboot is my experience.
I'm an IT consultant and have seen my share of problem switches. I'm currently using a Cisco 8 port that would go nuts 10 minutes after plugging it in. I replaced the power adapter and it's been fine ever since.
This is great. You have good troubleshooting experience then. I've overlooked something I should have seen more times than I can count. That's why it's great to share the details of your setup and get the community helping you examine the facts. These guys have help me with big and small problems numerous times.
Yup. It's also one of those things that's easy to overlook when thinking about possible problem causes.
19 posts were split to a new topic: Issues with Iris Smart Plugs as Z-Wave Repeaters
I appreciate all the help but think, for the time being, I’m done with HE. I’ve done everything suggested but just can’t get HE to consistently control my Z-wave devices. Although I have fewer Zigbee, they seem to be much less of an issue.
One minute HE seems to be fine and the next it’s not. One minute one device isn’t responding and the next minute it responds almost instantaneously.
Further more the interoperability with Cloud services isn’t working consistently for me. Alexa and Google home seem to never know the status of a device. You tell Alexa to turn on a device, one minute it works great, the next nothing and another time the devices turns on but she replies with the device is not responding.
I went from ST to openHAB. OpenHAB worked flawlessly controlling my devices but there’s a huge learning curve. Although I loved all the things I was learning it was consuming my time so I thought I would give HE a go. In the end, HE is much simpler platform but was spending all my time troubleshooting.
I’ll keep an eye on the community and look forward to a time I can migrate back.
All the best, Glenn
