How to get rid of Phantom (Ghost, Non Operating) Zwave Nodes

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So just had an interesting issue come up wanted to report it here. Kind of a "well duh" moment..

Going through the latest and greatest Z-Wave PC Controller SW with my Z Stick I noticed what I thought was a "ghost" device - a "repeater slave". Tried a bunch of ways to remove and was unsuccessful. Then realized that I had probably force excluded the z-wave device part of an Iris repeater outlet. Temporarily unplugged the 2 Iris's I have set which allowed me to "fail remove" the device...

Also wanted to express how irrationally happy I am over being able remove the ghost devices thanks to Z-Stick and SI Labs Z-Wave PC Control software..

Not sure I understand what the real impact this will have but it's nice to see a "clean" list of devices. Between this and the Zniffering (I'm using a uzb3 stick for that) feel like I'm gaining a bit more control/understanding over the Z-Wave part of my network.

For the zigbee part I have some XBee stuff on order.

edit1: so just kicked off a Zniffering session and now my entire network is reporting 9.6 Kbit/s speed all the time no 40 or 100 ... Maybe it's the Z-Stick?

edit2: Yep that was it. Unplugged from PC and reran.. speed is showing back up. Don't know if it was a real thing or not. Had 2 sticks on my laptop the Z-Stick and UZB3.

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Do you still have an zwave (not plus) devices?

Two RF transmitters that close are very likely to interfere. You could put one on a USB extension of a foot or two.

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No I eliminated them. I've just relocated my hub to my main floor from the basement to hopefully get it closer to the new repeaters I put in. The MS6's are very chatty at 9.6 Kb/s and still appear to be routing even though I re-paired them using batteries then switched them back to usb.

Seeing very poor performance on my network according to zniffer - very little 100 Kbit/s traffic at all anymore. Maybe am interpreting things wrong but everything I've been doing seems to be making things worse. My inexperience is the main issue I think.

Getting a little disheartened at this point even though I think the tech is cool. :worried:

edit: relocated hub then ran a repair, network speed picking up a little. Don't really want to keep the hub on my main floor though. Thinking about excluding the MS6's in the basement (they aren't critical), doing a repair, waiting a bit then bringing them back under usb power.

I must be in the Home Automation game for longer than I thought.
I just did a count and I have 11 zwave (not plus) devices, primarily outlets.
I'm not sure that I really need them, so I might just remove them from the mesh.
If necessary, I just might buy a few zwave plus plugs.

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It sneaks up on you definitely! The goal is to simplify and streamline my network as much as possible. Am a bit mystified as to the MS6 situation though.

I can confirm, after nightly reboots for a year, I still had 15 ghost nodes. Is failed, then remove failed and it worked. So HE is supposed to clear these, but it does not.
Not happy about that.
Anyway, pairing the zooz S2 stick was a real b1tch. It failed to replicate the nodes like 6 times, finally using classic learn mode(pretty sure someone said NOT to do that) I got it to join HE. It only grabbed about 60% of my devices, and also the stick never finished intializing in HE, but I left it like that, and just closed the HE webpage. The stick still doesn't show in HE z-wave details, but it can control devices.
The documentation for pc controller is sorely lacking, so I stumbled my way through(Zooz was somewhat helpful in this) by practicing on my ST hub and my DEV HE hub, once I was sure I wasn't going to bork my primary hub, I went for it.
I'm considering doing it all over to document with pictures, as I spent about a week futzing around with it.
Can someone please tel me how the hell I have 55 z-wave devices?

I used a silicon labs ACC-UZB3-U-STA USB stick. With PC controller. It found about half-a-dozen ghost nodes and 5 stranded nodes. Deleted them all, and then I excluded it from HE.

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Hey Aaiyar, question, when you excluded from HE, what button did you hit in PC Controller to exclude it? My S2 stick lacks any buttons

NWE (network wild wide exclude). The stick I have lacks any buttons as well.

Edit: Thanks @TOBob for catching the typo. Network wild exclude sounds like something wrong at Daytona Beach :grin:

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I have a Z-Stick - For me I had to exclude using the learn mode.. I did the device remove in HE then clicked on "learn mode" and it worked. Seemed kind of counter-intuitive at the time.

edit: @jeubanks helped me out in the other thread.

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One closing note here, for anyone reading this in the future.
When you try and join your zwave stick (AeoTec, UZB, Zooz, etc.) with Hubitat, you are transferring a relatively large amount of data all at once.
I recommend doing that initial join (pairing) relatively close to the hub so that your join will be complete and quick.

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Hello, I just happen to acquire a z-stick as part of an ebay bundle with an Aeon repeater.
The z-stick never finishes initializing. I excluded the z-stick 3 times in a row, rebooted HE and pc-controller multiple times. Do you have a "z-stick trick" to get it to finish initialization?
My z-stick never shows in HE z-wave details. My zooz stick always pairs & initializes fine.and shows in HE z-wave details.
I'd like to fix the aeotec so I can carry it around for those difficult z-wave exclusions.

Paging Dr. Z-wave @bcopeland

Did you do a NWI (Network Wide Inclusion)?
Did you give it lots of time (in the 60 sec. window)?
Did you do the pairing close the the HE itself (within 3 feet)?
Did you do the pairing from scratch?

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You don't need it to be excluded for THAT to work.

Just press and hold the Z-Stick til the circle flashes orange, then put the other device into Exclude and the ZStick will blink blue twice and go back to Orange, ready for the next Exclude. You can do a room at once :slight_smile:

This final note is for anyone who is following this thread on "How to get rid of Phantom Nodes".

As described in this thread, if the Hubitat Zwave listing (in PC Controller) shows a node that is not shown in the Hubitat Zwave listing, then the PC Controller procedure of marking the node as failed, and then removing failed nodes (in PC Controller) may work.
It will only work if that node is not alive (i.e. still plugged in).
If it is still plugged in, you must exclude that node first, from Hubitat.

For example, if you have a zwave outlet, that you did a force remove on, that outlet will show up on the zwave node list in PC Controller, and not on the list in Hubitat. It will never be removed by the daily clean up procedure of Hubitat. The only way that I know of, to get rid of that type of phantom node, is to physically exclude it from the Hubitat zwave mesh.

Unfortunately, if you don't remember where those nodes were, you are out of luck!

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Thanks.
I have tried for hours(literally) with both of these sticks.
Yes i gave it over 5 mins with NWI
The stick is 3 feet from my HE Hub
Factory reset, multiple exclusions of the sticks.

What I've found for my situation, and with both the Z-stick and the Zooz stick, it only works if I use classic learn mode. I start z-wave inclusion on HE, then hit "classic learn mode" in PC Controller.
I've now done this many many times, and each and every time classic learn mode works.

The documentation for pc controller v5 is minimal with no clear illustration. So it only took me about 4 hours of fumbling to get it to work, the whole while thinking I was going to trash my z-wave mesh.

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You've only thought once of trashing your zwave network?
I think of doing that every day!!!

My latest thought: Since I have two Hubs, perhaps it's better to move all my devices from Hub1 (which has all my real devices) to Hub2 (which has no devices). ARggg!!! Transfering all those devices isn't going to be a small affair! Perhaps I should wait until the new hub is available, and maybe I'll be able to use the new migration tool??? I don't know....

Or maybe just convert everything to Zigbbee???
Or, just bite the bullet and replace everything with Lutron. (And get a loan to do that.)