I'm having lots of problems with the Generic Zwave driver and my light switches. I sue GE zwave switches - some are older but most are the Jasco white label switches commonly used here.
The issue I am having is On and Off work but they don't report the state correctly. Sometimes a poll fixes it other times not. Sometimes a level set fixes it other times not. I was told it was a known bug in 2.0 but it is still here in the latest push so I'm stumped.
Are they Z-wave or Z-wave Plus? For Z-wave plus you should be using the Generic Z-wave Smart drivers and for non-plus the Generic Z wave drivers. There was a fix in 2.0.1 for the Z wave Smart drivers because they were reporting incorrectly for Z-wave plus devices.
If you're using the Z-wave non-plus devices and the correct driver, there's an issue that they don't report back physical changes. That's why there's the z-wave poller app. But the Plus devices should be reporting correctly.
They are Zwave plus -- all but one. I tried both and neither works reliably. Oddly enough ST works great with all of them. Weird.
And I was having tons of trouble with my GE z-wave plus dimmer BEFORE the update. It would report physical changes but not digital ones from Hubitat. Maybe the "fix" broke something.
Yea i think it did... I can't turn on my switches at all using the web interface. Sometimes they work other times they just sit there. And of course this wreaks havoc on my smart panel app.
This is smart home 101 stuff that Hubitat has to get right... I was just about ready to start migrating my devices over from ST but now I'm not going to.
Hope they get on this and get it fixed.
By the way, Hue bulbs linked via Hubitat work perfectly so I'm pretty sure it is a driver issue.
And you're using the Generic Z wave SMART Switch or SMART dimmer drivers, right? Not the non-smart versions?
I'm using the Generic Z-Wave Dimmer device. Tried the smart version and it didn't help. The On and Off commands don't even do anything. It is so screwed up.
I'm going to remove it from Hubitat for now and add it back to ST so I can at least have lights.
You have to use the smart dimmer driver and you have to make sure to save it after you select the driver on the edit device page. The driver is working fine. I think you were using the wrong one. It should pick the right one automatically when it's paired. All mine did.
I used that one and I saved it and it wasn't working. I now have the same device back on ST and it works perfectly. Growing pains for the company...
You also need to click configure after saving the driver change.
@kewashi I have issues every now and then and turning off the breaker for a few minutes seems to clear it up. The air gap in GE devices doesn’t kill power to the zwave radio so breaker is required.
IF the devices are plus models then the “smart” drivers are the ones you should use. Mike has said the non-smart drivers are fire and forget.
I'm quite experienced with home automation stuff so obvious stuff like saving and picking the right drivers isn't my problem. There is a real issue that needs to be investigated here. It might be just my hub -- since I have a very early version - hub #3 actually. I don't know what it is but something is amuck.
I could try this but I shouldn't have to do this. I have the same switch repaired back with my ST hub and it is working like a charm. I have no idea what is wrong here. I have a Z-Wave power plug in the same room that is showing similar signs. Maybe my Z-wave mesh is just messed up.
FWIW I had the same exact issue in ST so it’s not a Hubitat issue. The GE Jasco devices can be problematic
But remember ST also polls all zwave devices every 10 seconds or so unlike HE. So it’s different in HE. Older GE devices don’t report status and ST solved this by the polling.
Regardless if you still continue to have issues email support and @bobbyD can help.
Okay cool... I have over 50 of these GE Jasco switches and haven't had any trouble with them until now with Hubitat. I understand ST does polling but they also report the proper state immediately after you cnange one. This isn't happening with HE. Anyway, I am going to give my HE hub a rest for now until it matures a bit more. I think there is a lot of promise here but it is still too early for me to use it in my production home environment. I still have a handful of sensors on HE for testing my HousePanel app so it's all good.
Knowing you were an early HE user, I am as well. I just recently reset my hub and paired all my devices again. I let my hub sit for a few days without automations following Bobby’s advice that he has documented here in the community.
Prior to the zwave settings changes which hide the failed devices I had some orphaned devices that would never go away and felt I had a gremlin in my hub as I was having some wierd issues. I have close to 100 GE switches, half Plus and half non-Plus. Since the reset everything has been working very well. I do have 2 hubs so I was able to use the second one as the new one and use the old so I could replicate all my apps.
I am not saying that everyone needs to do this but I wanted to throw this out there. I replaced a ton of devices with Plus models over the past 6 months and I wanted a fresh start to make sure my mesh was good.
This is what worries me about Zwave. I had a Veraplus that was great initially and then got slower and more unreliable, and now I'm getting the same issues on HE. It seems to be only on the Zwave part as my Sonos and itach devices work quickly but my Zwave stuff is now so slow it's unusable. I have a ticket in with support so hope it gets sorted but the thought of having to reset and re-pair all my devices is horrendous. I don't have a spare hub so presumably that would mean effectively starting from scratch. Surely there should be a way to "clean" the Zwave data, removing dead nodes etc rather than starting from scratch or leaving it for days to sort itself out.
I also have the same GE Zwave switches, 2 paddle and 2 toggles. The 2 toggle switches do not report back unless I send a poll request. The 2 paddle switches work fine. Both type of switches work fine in ST
Are some Z wave Plus and some regular z wave? Z wave plus switches will report back physical changes, z wave will not. ST got around this by polling all z wave switches all the time. Hubitat got around this by implementing the "Z wave poller" native app which you can find by going to apps and selected add built-in app.
You possibly have a bad Z-Wave device. I now at least have a tool to find misbehaving devices with XBee. No idea how one would go about it with Z-Wave though.
Any faulty device in a mesh of any type can cause problems. I had an Insteon outlet go bad and it made my dimmer on the opposite end of the house throw errors. Replaced the outlet and all good.
Both toggles are Zwave, the paddles are Zwave plus
Download the Hubitat app
