I have just setup PC Controller (PCC) (formerly zensys) and added a Z-stick Gen5 to my network for monitoring purposes. As part of the setup it grabbed info from Hubitat. I see in PCC a device Id 7
I'm pretty sure it's a remnant from a noob error I made where a Nano switch was reset without prior exclusion and then I complicated matters by restoring a backup.
I'd like to clean up this phantom but as it's not shown in Hubitat I can only do so with PCC, as far as I know. I'm totally new to PCC and I'm afraid of making matters worse by "just trying things" there. Can you verify there is no way to do this with Hubitat, or ease my fear of proceeding on PCC?
Eventually Z-Wave repair will mark a device as dead and I think eventually drops it. If it doesn't drop it, at the very least it will stop trying to communicate with it. It does take a few runs at least though. I don't remember how many.
I'm not sure what secondary controllers are allowed to do but if you have one of the early versions of the HE hub where the Z-Wave radio is a USB stick you can remove that and plug it into a PC with PC Controller and remove it yourself by marking it as dead and then forcing a remove.
Did you happen to try marking it and force removing it with your USB stick as a secondary controller? I don't know if that's safe but if it's not falling off after a bunch of repairs and it's still not marked as dead you might give it a try.
A trick that we used on SmartThings was to create a virtual Z-Wave device, using the same driver as the phantom device and give it the same id number as the phantom device and then remove it. I don't know if it will work on HE but worth a shot.
Thank you for that. It's been 2 or 3 weeks. Maybe it takes longer.
Thank you for that as well but either I didn't do it right or it doesn't work with Hubitat.
After 3 iterations of Z-stick reset, marking the 07 device as failed and then removed failed, along with restoring the Hubitat backup from 3 days ago (before I added Z-Stick to the mix), I managed to get rid of 07. BUT I wound up with 3 Z-stick controllers. So I marked the earlier ones as failed and then removed failed to wind up with:
Restoring the hub database doesn't do anything to the Z-Wave device table. That is stored in the Z-Wave radio. The hub will eventually clean up failed nodes as mentioned, but it has to be marked failed by the hub. It can take 2-3 missed active periods before that happens, and it can take longer to clean up the failed node.
Repair may do it sooner, but repair is primarily to rebuilt the neighbor table of the nodes the Z-Wave radio knows about. Don't worry too much about a single "ghost" node hanging around. Many can be an issue, but not one.
Glad you solved the issue, but proceed with caution if you have an extensive Z-Wave network. The repair of the entire thing would be a nightmare if you messed something up with third-party software.
