I spent about 3 hours last night removing 68 ghost nodes from my network. This is the third time I have removed numerous ghost nodes from my network, but the most by a factor of 3x.
What was unique about last night (apart from the large number), was that more were showing up as I was removing others. I had to exclude and re-include my Z-wave stick from my hub three separate times in order to get the devices that were popping into the hub while I was removing the other ghosts, to show in the PC Controller app so I could remove them.
I suspect that my network setup could be part if the issue. I currently have five C7s and about 150 Z-Wave devices. Of the 150 about 130 are active (about 20 of the devices are Leviton Z-wave switches that act as a hard-wired slave in 3, 4 and 5-way switch circuits, therefore are not managed by the hub). Four of the C7s are strategically placed around my home. Each have 30-ish active z-wave devices. The fifth C7 acts as an "accumulator" for all of the devices connected via hub mesh (all devices are shared from their home C7 and linked to the fifth C7). This allows the control of all of the devices through fifth C7 as well as allowing the execution of some Apps/Routines that include devices that span across multiple hubs.
If it would be helpful, I can give some more details of my network.
The good news, apart from the ghost nodes, adding the additional hubs has seemingly resolved all of the reliability and latency problems that had plagued my setup and frustrated my family for months.
It may be worth noting that the ghost nodes are ONLY popping up on the C7 hub that, at one point, acted as the sole hub on my network. I have had zero ghost nodes appear on any of the four C7s that were added to the network about a month ago.
I now have 3 ZWave USB sticks, one per ZWave hub. When I start PC Controller, I pick the USB stick I need for that session. I'm also around 150 devices, 4 hubs. Very similar.
I suspect that the reason adding the hubs gained you stability was that it took the majority of your mesh off of the hub with the ghosts. As to why so many, I have a few theories but they all revolve around the general premise that ghosts are generally created by a failed pairing attempt or by forcing the removal of a device when it won't exclude normally.
@thebearmay because of my stability issues, I have kept a close eye on the devices on each of my hubs (probably daily). If ghosts exist, I remove them relatively promptly.
I agree with your thought that the ghosts are generally created by a failed pairing attempt or forcing the removal when it wont exclude normally. Now that you mention it, I'm sure 68 is about the number (not quite) of nodes I forced removed from that hub in order to pair them with the new hubs.
Is there any science behind what causes the timing of when the ghost nodes to appear? Is there something I did with the hub or Z-Wave stick that caused so many to pop in at once?
