I recently finished moving my last devices to Hubitat from SmartThings, including an Aeotec USB stick. After including the USB stick, I used Zensys tools to review the network topology that the USB stick says it learned from Hubitat, and I see a number of "phantom" Z-Wave devices there that aren't currently connected to, or reflected as software devices in, Hubitat.
When I was dealing with SmartThings, if I encountered phantom devices, I had to create virtual devices with the same Z-Wave network addresses as the phantom devices and then "force remove" those devices to get the SmartThings hub to delete them from the Z-Wave network table. Is this something I would have to do in Hubitat?
My preliminary thinking is that, at a higher level in the software stack, Hubitat somehow treats phantom Z-Wave differently from how SmartThings treated them. When I ran Z-Wave network repairs in SmartThings, phantom devices would give rise to errors (since they obviously can't respond to Z-Wave commands in connection with the repair process), but I don't get any errors or other messages corresponding to phantom devices when running Z-Wave network repairs in Hubitat, even though the network information revealed in Zensys tools indicates that some of the phantom devices should be repeaters (and, therefore, should be participating in Hubitat's network repair process).
Would someone be able to help me understand how Hubitat handles phantom Z-Wave devices? Do I need to take any housekeeping action, like I had to with SmartThings, to get Hubitat to remove these from the Z-Wave network table? Thanks!
Thanks, @billmeek. The linked thread is helpful---I'm glad to hear (and not surprised) that Hubitat has a better approach here than SmartThings did.
If these nodes are supposed to have been removed automatically, should they no longer appear in the network topology that Zensys tools is seeing?
The linked thread suggests that sometimes the Hubitat Z-Wave chip refuses to delete ghosts/phantoms that the Hubitat software platform asks be deleted in the course of automatic cleanup; the linked thread suggests that the way to fix this is to reboot the hub (which, incidentally, I have done).
If I shouldn't be seeing any ghosts/phantoms in Zensys tools (and that is my open follow-up question), then rebooting the hub wouldn't seem to have helped for me, given that the ghosts/phantoms are still there?
I'm not the one to answer these questions as I'm a relatively new user. I just happened to read the thread that I linked to recently and was able to find it quickly. While I have an Aeotec Z-Stick here and downloaded Zensys, I haven't actually used them yet.
I would like to know if the ghost nodes are really disappearing overnight, in the past I can say this never happened, recently like 3 months ago, but maybe your case is different. Ghost nodes caused a lot of reliability problems, slowdowns, etc. in my system, after I deleted them manually(c4 hub and zensys) everything worked as it should. Please take a look and let us know if they dissapeared.
I believe Chuck 100% when he says that is what is SUPPOSED to happen. But I know from experience that is not what ALWAYS happens.
I had a ghost zwave device hang around for over a month before, and survive multiple hub reboots. It was definitely not in the device list, and was not referenced/used anywhere.
I finally got bored with it and deleted it manually in zensys tools.
That said, I have seen other times where the ghost went away on its own, so it does work as described at least some of the time (probably most of the time).
I was corresponding with @bobbyD last week on this subject because I was concerned that I wasn't able to remove (exclude) one of the old GE Z-wave switches that I was removing. I don't want to put words in his mouth (which is why I tagged him) but I got the impression the process might take a few days . . .
Hi, @JasonJoel, @Eric.C.Miller, and @vjv. I have confirmed that, after multiple additional Z-Wave network repairs, hub reboots, and platform updates (and rollbacks… as Joel knows), I have a number of Z-Wave ghosts still visible in Zensys that are not among the Z-Wave devices recognized by the software stack on my Hubitat (see, for example, nodes 11 and 13 below):
No specific idea, but I’m sure it was over the course of including/excluding devices over time (months of being on Hubitat). I haven’t previously checked for phantoms on Hubitat because I never saw them raising any errors during Z-Wave network repairs. They still don’t raise any errors, which seems odd, given that they are supposedly line-powered devices that would be repeaters participating in network repairs.
Thanks, @vjv and @JasonJoel . The purpose of this thread, having established that Z-Wave ghosts/phantoms do persist, is not just for informational purposes but to get to the bottom of how one should remove them from the hub's Z-Wave radio, understanding that Hubitat does not always do so on its own.
I have already cycled through the end of the Z-Wave node numbers (232), but some of these are currently unused (due to removing devices previously added). As I have been adding new devices, Hubitat has predictably started back from the beginning to reassign open node numbers, but I have noticed that the hub is skipping over the ghost/phantom node numbers. I'm not currently noticing problems posed by the ghosts/phantoms in terms of packet routing or other aspects of mesh performance, but I am concerned that Hubitat's Z-Wave radio will incorrectly think I have run out of available Z-Wave nodes before I actually have. Particularly given that the software stack doesn't seem to be aware of this issue, I'm concerned, among other things, about unpredictable behaviors and/or unexpected errors that may be difficult to recover from.
