Frustrated, Becoming Disappointed

Hi community,

I've been lurking for a while and as the title suggests I am becoming frustrated with Hubitat to the point of thinking about considering other options.
Local control was an important consideration for me when choosing a hub because my primary requirement for automation is because I am disabled, and the ability to say unlock a lock without requiring Internet access is critical. To this end my router and hub are on a UPS.
By way of background, in a former life I was a programmer so I am reasonably technical.

I have a reasonably simple setup with about 30 devices, mostly zwave (Aeotec), but unfortunately at this stage my few simple tuya devices are more reliable and quite often more responsive!
Additionally, I don't think doing a nightly reboot or constant zwave repairs, which take an hour and don't always fix the problem, are acceptable, viable solutions.

Sorry for the gripe. I really do want to like Hubitat, but my experience so far is that it is a beta platform not ready for primetime.

What do you think? Prove to me that I am wrong!

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Welcome aboard and let's try and get you sorted :grinning:.

Sound similar of a mesh issue. I have had odd things in the past when I have done stuff wrong without realising (2 years ago) and not had a issue since.

Please list your devices and quantities of them. Also how did you go about installing them, is there ones that are more of a issue?

There is a issue with this statement aswell, no good voice control or one built into Hubitat is local. They all need the internet to work. The app is local and any device directly connected is. So a button to click or you arriving can do what you want without the internet but not your voice.

Also what apps are you using?

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First of all .. Welcome to the community...

Secondly.. Can you give a little more on what your issues are?... You glazed over your issue which Iโ€™m guessing you are having some z-wave issue, because you mentioned aeotec..

Third.. If it is z-wave issues .. Can you give me a little info on your mesh setup?

Background on me: Network Engineer / Developer.. I donโ€™t do nightly reboots .. In fact I never reboot.

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Ok.. I rebooted once.. But it was a very stupid programming mistake and I had to clear out the memory quick.. :crazy_face:

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I don't really see that as a big deal. SHOULD you have to do it? Of course not. Is is a "big deal" to have to? Not really (to me). Now if the reboot doesn't help your issues, then ignore that part. :man_shrugging:

For the record I don't think I need to reboot on a schedule any more...

My issue was that the built in motion lighting app was occasionally creating HUGE bursts of zwave traffic (5+ events/sec) and filling the buffer/queue. Unclear to me if it was that I misconfigured the app (although it had been working with no issues for MONTHS), or if it was an app/hub bug. I don't have time to troubleshoot apps I can't even see the code for, so I just stopped using motion lighting. And the problem went away 100%.

Also stopped using RM and now my hub is like lightning. :wink:

I am almost the same.. I still use RM for quick one off small rules.. But for anything more complex I use groovy... Itโ€™s not that RM is bad in any way, itโ€™s just really high level and as such will be more resource intensive.. Groovy code runs crazy fast here..

So I do have a bunch of small RM rules..
I do use Motion Lighting in all common areas (Living Room, Kitchen, Bathroom, Utility Room, etc).. I have no issues with that one.. But I will probably roll that into a larger app that Iโ€™m working on in the future..

But this has gone off topic.. I apologize to OP..

Hi All,

Thanks for replying and my apologies for the late response.

Over the last week I've been trying to identify the exact scenarios that are causing my issues;

What is happening;
Every 24 to 36 hours all Zwave devices stop working.
I can find no errors or log entries anywhere, and the Zwave Table appears normal.

What doesn't work to fix;
Multiple reboots (by themselves)
Attempting to Zwave repair - doesn't even start
Toggling Zwave on and off (Disable / Enable)

What does work to fix;
Whilst hub is on, pull out Usb Zwave dongle, wait 10 seconds, and reinsert dongle... Then reboot hub. Occasionally I may then have to toggle Zwave also.

That's it... Wait 24 to 36 hours and repeat! :thinking:

Environment;
No ZigBee
Zwave
Aeotec
9 x Nano Dimmers
4 x Multisensor 6 (powered)
2 x Door Sensor 7
1 x Recessed Door Sensor 7

Danalock V3

WiFi
2 x Nanoleaf Aurora

I live in a 3 Bedroom Apartment.

@BorrisTheCat
Sorry about my bad punctuation, I meant "say" as in e.g. I'm aware of the cloud/voice assistant scenario.

@JasonJoel
Call me old school, well I am, but requiring frequent/regular reboots does not suggest stability... Hence my beta comments in my original post.

Nor do I think not using a much touted feature such as RM should be a solution...

I don't know, I don't think I'm expecting too much, but perhaps I am?

The problem for us.. the people responding, trying to assist, is we can do nothing for your frustration.. except perhaps compare it to our own. All we really have is a) a willingness to hear your view, and b) some examples of what's helped against our own frustrations.

Depends on the time frame.. if the time frame is yesterday and today, I'd answer yes, too much. If the time frame is longer.. then I'd answer no.

However, back to the problem you are encountering vs the number of devices and I'd side with you. To me it's 'impossible' from my frame of reference. Less than 20 ZWave devices is tiny, to me. So much Aeotec and I'm even more baffled.

If you can, without risk of mutiny, use the disable column in Devices and disable 'half' your devices.

24-36 hours later, if not improved, enable them all and disable the other half. One of those two just might make a difference.

Reboot alone does NOT shut power to the ZWave stick. Shutdown the Hub, via the menu, and pull the power for 15 seconds after the hub light turns red. That should work 'better' than unplugging the stick with power on, in my opinion.

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Looks like most of your "things" are powered. I have one question. When you paired your aeotec multisensors, did you pair them with power or on battery?
If they're paired on battery they will not repeat if connected to power after. You need to pair with power for them to repeat. The reason I ask is because they happen to have good range and are great repeaters. Also, the aeotec multis are really chatty and report almost too often. @csteele has a driver out for the multis that is a little more controllable if you want to check that out.

I think @erktrek has had some experience with these. He might not have been satisfied with them (I could be remembering wrong; hence the tag).

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I have had a bit different experience...

I had several powered ones in my basement. The MS6's were basically surrounding my hub and became the primary repeaters for everything else. When zniffing discovered the speeds were terribly slow was getting throughput of 9.6kbit/s most everywhere - even with all my devices being zwave+. They might be fast for a few connections but maybe choke on a larger number of connections.... just a guess.

Tried the trick about pairing them with battery first then switching over to usb power stop repeating but still repeated. Updated the firmware, relocated the hub, added repeater(s) etc. still had flaky performance.

Finally swapped most of them out with Inovelli 4-in-1's (usb power, don't repeat) and things seem to stabilize. I still have one left but it seems to be okay - now on the edge I think. Was never able to pin down exactly the cause but certainly the MS6's were at least contributing to my woes.

Hope this helps!

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That's really interesting... I'm pretty sure the manual specifically mentions this. I wonder if it applies only to much earlier firmwares. Did you confirm with Zniffing that they were still repeating after pairing on battery? Did you perform a factory reset after excluding (even though I suppose an exclude should also reset)?

It was a chaotic time - I may have reset a unit or two but probably not all of them now that you mention it. Food for thought thanks!

At least the new units do not repeat so no worries there.

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