So before I get a million canned responses let me first say that I have tried recommendations from at least 10 different posts and spent months trying to resolve this. I'm a CTO of a software company, the last thing I wanted to do was write this, but I'm at my wits end...
Here's the issue: Every day, sometimes multiple times a day, simple rules fail to work. Devices become unresponsive and using the app, dashboard etc to control devices doesn't work.
What I have to do: I have attempted to restart the hub through the UI. That doesn't work. It does restart as requested, but it doesn't resolve the issue. The only way to resolve the issue is to completely power down the hub, unplug it and wait 30 seconds and plug it back in. This will sometimes resolve the issue for minutes, sometimes for a day.
Number of Z-Wave Devices Powered: 40
Number of Z-Wave Devices Battery: 5 (edited from 0)
Number of Zigbee Devices Powered: 1
Number of Zigbee Devices Battery: 10
Number of Hue Lights: 34
Number of Rule Machine Rules: 20
Number of Button Controllers: 8
About 8 other apps with one rule each
Steps to troubleshoot:
1 - Looked for ghost devices using USB stick. None found
2 - Repaired Z-Wave network
3 - Looked through logs at approximate times, no errors other than a few with image size issues from the Google SDM API package.
4 - No errors are logged with the System Logs
5 - Attempted to figure out which device or devices might be causing issues. I have no idea. There's no specific event or time of day that makes it work or fail.
6 - Checked all of the rule machine rules for validity, most are extremely simple and no errors being logged.
7 - I have about 10 log events every minute... I don't think that should be excessive.
8 - It's not a range issue as many of the devices are within 10 feet of the hub.
I don't know what else to try. But when all of your lights, blinds, camera notifications etc are going through the hub, it gets really annoying. When I walk into a room and the light switch does nothing... it gets old quick. I previously had ST and I had all the same devices and never had this issue. I left ST to get away from the cloud.
The majority of the Z-Wave devices are Innovelli Switches a good 25-30. There's a couple GE Switches (240 volt), A Zooz Motion, Zooz Siren, 5 recessed door sensors, Aeotec Siren, about 10 Spring Window Fashions (Blinds). Almost all of the Zigbee devices are old ST Window Sensors.
I'm no expert but its safe to say your issues are in the minority which suggest something in your environment. Back when I was having lots of problems, my issues were tied to zigbee bulbs. That doesn't appear to be your issue but I think something could be happening in the radio band, be it zigbee or z-wave. In my unscientific opinion I think commands happen in a way the cloggs things up. Perhaps a command getting repeated over and over and other commands backing up behind. This could put a load on the hub which could slow things down even more. I think when the hub is rebooted it doesn't do anything with the actual zigbee or z-wave radios, whereas shutting the hub down powers off them off. Zigbee is in the WiFi band and z-wave is in another popular band of all kinds of gadgets. I have a weather station smack in the z-wave band. Who knows what kind of radio interference is happening. If you haven't tried changing the zigbee channel of your hub that may help. It did for me on a zigbee lock that just dropped off randomly.
The funny thing is all of the sensors still log everything just fine. Both Zigbee and Z-Wave. The issue is controlling them. In other words all incoming traffic from the devices to the hub is logged and appears to be normal. When a command is sent to the device is when it doesn't work. The UI shows the command being logged, but nothing happens.
Additionally, the UI doesn't slow down at all, the hub doesn't lock up.
I'm on a way lower level than you guys, but the other day I plugged in a Hue bridge and bulb just so that I could download a firmware upgrade for a Hue motion detector. For whatever reason, it gummed up the works. Removing the hub and bulb made things go smooth again. Some kind of interference, I suppose.
Yes trust me it's crossed my mind many times to start taking things off one by one, but that leads to another problem.
All of my lights in the house are controlled via Z-Wave. Many of the switches don't have a wire going from the switch to the lighting appliance as you would in a traditional house. The switches use Z-Wave to communicate to groups of lighting, mostly through Hue. So if I remove the Hue integration then I get Wife and Kid agro... "Why doesn't my light turn on". Telling them to use the Hue app for the mean time results in lots of angry looks and threats to sleep outside in the cold.
The integrations actually go much deeper than that because we don't have a way to open or close the blinds in the house unless it's through voice. So if that doesn't work then I'm really in trouble.
Again, I'm not advanced like these other guys, but how about stuff like changing the channel on the Hue bridge? Also, nobody ever mentions changing the wifi frequency from 2.4 to 5 gHz, but I wonder if that could help in some way.
Is there any way you could remember or have a log somewhere of when these issues started and what you might have done? I'm sure you have thought about it...probably dreaming about it at this point, lol.
My hunch is that it has something to do with the blinds and/or the recessed door sensors. Both of those use generic drivers. My other half tried to close the blinds just before I replied and it went haywire again, blinds didn't close and everything stopped working.
Unfortunately many people in this forum have requested drivers for this brand of blinds, but it seems that everyone is told to use the generic.
I had major problems with my Z-Wave mesh lately and they sound very similar... and 2 things seemed to resolve them:
Move my Inovelli bulbs to another hub
Reduce the power reporting on my Inovelli Red Z-Wave switches... I have many of them, but not 25-30. So it is very probable that this is a main cause of the issue...
Thanks for this suggestion. I have mixed feelings on disabling power reporting. If I have to I will but I've read many reports that state this is just myth and not fact. Additionally, I never had issues using ST with the same devices. The only reason I left ST was because we live in a rural area where the internet goes out. That left us without lights.
The issue appears to happen when a command is sent. As a matter of fact if I go to sleep with it working I always wake up with it working. Thus, when no one is using the system, it remains fine.
I'll go ahead and spend the time disabling it and see how it goes. It'll probably take me a couple hours to go through them all.
This is something you can test. There’s no need to guess that it might or might not work. Disabling the power reporting is not a difficult task and easily reverted if you find no improvement from it.
There’s no loss from the action or ill consequence, but you get stability if it resolves the issue.
