I suck at understanding zwave info. Help?

[brad5]

@rlithgow1

if you have a failed pairing, stop, check for ghosts, remove ghosts, reset device and try again.

The good news is if you do stop right away you can usually remove the ghost with a zwave exclude on the device that just failed to include.

[672southmain]

@brad5

The good news is if you do stop right away you can usually remove the ghost with a zwave exclude on the device that just failed to include.

But you will need to remove power from that last device while trying the Remove/Refresh. As long as it responds to a ping, you won’t be able to get rid of it.

[brad5]

@672southmain

But you will need to remove power from that last device

My experience has been that an immediate exclude after a failed include prevents the ghost from becoming an issue - as long as you do it right away before the device is successfully included. But of course to exclude a device it has to be powered on.

[bobbyD]

@brad5

I'm not sure a ghost will heal without intervention. The rest of the mesh will, but the ghost may continue to be an issue.

Actually is worse. Heal, aka repair, rebuilds the routing tables, so if ghosts are present, then chances are that they will be part of the new routing tables, meaning that good devices will try to communicate with the hub via dead devices, causing those good devices to fail.

[markbellkosel84]

If I DO wipe ZWave and start from scratch will that mean I will have to go in and reassociate the devices will all the automations they are attached to or will those be retained?

[rlithgow1]

Yes. The best thing to do is temporarily create some virtual devices and put those in your rules, do the reset, factory reset the devices, re pair, and then put them back in the rules. That way you don't have to worry about rewriting rules.