Has Hubitat fixed Z-wave?

My C8 hub is handling Z-wave better than anything I have ever seen. Everything I have is now directly connected to each device and the Z-wave delays and failures of the past have just gone away.

Has Hubitat actually fixed Z-wave?

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If I had to guess, it's a combination of SiLabs fixing issues with 700-series chips in the 800-series chips, and the addition of external antennas.

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Maybe not Hubitat directly themselves as @aaiyar hinted at, but yes for me the C8 makes Z-wave what I always imagined it should be!

My ultimate test is my large rule that shuts down the house for going to bed. Used to always be lag for the lights going out which I have staged in sections already to avoid problems with the C7. Now I can count it down, 1 second this section goes off, 2 seconds another section.... works great every night.

Possibly just an antenna on the C7 maybe have helped? But also I would like to believe it is in part due to the new 800 series chip.

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My guess would be the antenas fixed most of the problem left because people with the C7 that installed external antennas seem to say that the problems they had before have pretty much disappeared.

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True.

Although, I got to tell you - thanks to @lewis.heidrick, I had a full wave antenna on my C-7, and the quarter-wave antenna on the C-8, still gives better response times. So I’m suspecting there are some 800-series improvements also in play here.

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I think optimizing the power level for the antenna could make improvements as well.

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I noticed something similar.

I do think the antenna is a big part of the positive results. I have noticed that Zigbee is performing about the same.

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Yea, glad to see the internals go in favor of externals. All the mods were really burning me out.

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From reading the forum here, I wouldn't use the word fixed. I'd say the antenna on the C8 greatly helped things, but I'm still seeing people post ghost issues.
My perspective is that it probably improved, but time will tell if it's fixed, as HE has often said the issues are with the SDK and nothing they could do.

Just a few from a quick search:

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For what it's worth (My topic is the zwaveCrashed Often one), the migration was incredibly smooth, and it seems like my issue with zwave was likely a corrupted zwave database (Sadly, requiring a reset of the zwave radio, and re-pairing all my devices).

I'm about halfway through the re-pair process, and so far have had no crashes after the reset. That doesn't rule out one of my other devices being spammy or hosing the network, but it's promising.

On the ghost devices: I did have one ghost after migration (Maybe was there before migration), but removal worked perfectly fine in the C-8, I didn't need to use the z-stick to remove the ghost. Just refresh, wait for it to timeout, and then remove, and poof. A sign that maybe SiLabs has fixed the SDK for the 800 series chips.

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Great to hear it.

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Building off of this, what causes the ghosts to be undeletable? Is it the zwave chip series in the hub, or is it network related?

Usually they wont delete because for whatever reason the zwave chip is saying that when it pinged the node it replied back. Which often times is impossible because the device is ripped from the wall and gone. Next time I get one I am going to zniffer the traffic and see whats going on.

Well we're all appreciative of your efforts...

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This is confusion... People are seeing devices connected directly to the hub instead of hops and they're confused as to why, not realizing that this is preferred...

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Another update: after rebuilding my network (took several hours), I'm more 24 hours without a crash, and no ghosts to remove after 2 pairing failures. Seems like the new chip and sdk are a good improvement.

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I post your z-wave details page and let's see how it looks

I have a somewhat different observation. Upon upgrading to the C8's from C7's, and letting the mesh settle in over a week, I actually feel like there is some degradation.

For example, with 110 Z-Wave devices that were connected directly to the C7, now about 30 are routing through other devices on the C8. Both hubs are in the same place... I had done the @lewis.heidrick mod on the C7's which caused almost all but one of my devices to connect directly to the C7.

The C8 for some reason feels the need to route through other devices...

That being said, I had yet another GE switch fail and had to replace it without the ability to un-pair... I will say the ghost left behind was easily removed by the C8.

:man_shrugging:

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Did you try swapping back the antennas?