I have had my setup for a couple of years now, and for the most part it works well. I have occasionally experienced long delays between when I press a remote button, and when the actions execute. Almost always, issuing a Siri command to turn the desired light on or off works immediately, so it always seems to be how well the hub gets the button press.
Recently I replaced a button remote that died with a Zooz Wall Remote, a 4-button rechargeable device. It was amazing how much better it worked. Whereas the previous remote usually took a few seconds to initiate the change (turning off one light, turning on another, and a third to 50%), this one was nearly instantaneous. And reliably so.
Until I updated my Hubitat controller a couple days ago.
Now virtually all of my remote switches fail to be recognized. None of these devices work any more (one worked once, after a very, very long delay):
Zooz Wall Remote
Aeotec NanoMote
Aeon Multisensor 6 (turns on my lights when I enter a room)
Zooz Zen32 Scene Controller (mains-powered wall switch with 4 extra buttons)
I tried rebooting the hub, but it made no difference. Operating these devices never shows up in the logs when I press buttons, although there are a few log entries for some of these since the update.
When the system works, it's fairly nice, although I wish the latency between button press and light change was much lower. Nevertheless, it's usually under a second or two. But now, none of my oft-used remotes works at all, and I don't know what to do about it.
Sounds like you have a Z-Wave mesh problem. You might have ghost devices that would slow down commands to Z-Wave devices. There are lots of topics here about how to diagnose Z-Wave mesh issues.
Have you run a Z-Wave Repair? Does it complete without failures? How many Z-Wave devices do you have?
Aside from installing one new Zooz wall remote, I have made no changes to the devices since the last time I painstakingly removed ghost devices (going so far as to use a PC and SiLabs tools) and repairing my network. Do ghost devices just magically appear over time?
Regarding disabled devices: During Halloween I use a number of outdoor z-wave plugs to control things. When I put them away I disable them in the device list. Generally, I don't think they participate in the mesh for my indoor devices, because the metal in my walls (lath inside and stucco outside) really kill the RF through the walls.
In this case, all the outdoor devices were powered (if off), and everything was working fine until I updated the firmware.
That may have fixed it! For now, anyway. I guess a reboot is not as thorough?
Disabling devices doesn't prevent the radio to continue to look for those devices. It just stops the communication between the hub and the driver. Taking devices offline, is like storing your arms and legs. Your brain (hub's radio) will make every effort to use of your limbs (repeaters) but will fail because they are offline, so your mesh experience will suffer.
That's a PITA. I'm not gonna leave these all out in the yard all year. Nevertheless, things were working fine before Halloween (although there was occasional excessive latency), and were working fine during Halloween, and now that I've powered down and back up the hub, seem to be working fine again.
I'm sure it's just a matter of time before another problem rears its head. At least I’ll know to try power cycling the hub next time.
A mesh network works properly when all connected devices are reachable. You can use devices temporarily then exclude them, though even doing so, doesn't come without penalty, as the radio continuously rearranges the nodes for the best performance. Removing established nodes from the mesh carries the risk of causing mesh instability. Taking them offline, is a guarantee to cause havoc in both Zigbee and Z-Wave. I suggest using non mesh devices in the future to limit the risk of future problems.
I have 3 Xmas switches that only get used 5 weeks a year.
I didn't want to exclude them so I just moved them to a power bar in the workroom and leave them plugged in all year.
I did the same, but I got annoyed at these devices taking up room on my workbench (first world problem, right?).
Last time the Smarter Home ran a sale, I bought a number of indoor and outdoor zwave LR plugs to replace my zwave and zigbee plugs used for Christmas lights. Since LR devices don't participate in a mesh, there shouldn't be any adverse effects by disconnecting them.
I paired them to the hub a few weeks ago, then disconnected them. No problems, as expected.
Yes, either go the ZWave LR route on these temp devices, so they don't join the mesh, or go with Matter over WiFi (as there are a bunch of cheap Tapo plugs that work well for this) - I guess it depends on the range of your WiFi, but the key is to NOT have temp devices are part of a regular Zwave or Zigbee mesh..
I go with the Matter/WiFi route, but ZwaveLR also works well in this regard, so YMMV.
