I have about 30 Leviton dimmers and switches. It has been extremely difficult pairing these to HE. I have done the Z-stick exclude, put the hub close, repaired and rebooted more times than I can count. In almost every instance, the device discovery window will say, for example, "Found Z-wave 21", and say "Initializing". It will stay this way with the spinning blue circle like it is still working. I have let it stay that way for more than 24 hours. I have to reboot the hub to get it to go away.
Can anyone offer any solutions? I have wasted countless hours on this.
I have about 50 mixed switches / dimmers (600W & 1000W) and I have not had a single issue paring them. Other people here have them too, definately not normal, you should open a support case...
Have you upgraded the firmware on them? Not that the older firmware had any problem pairing but they had some bugs that will drive you nuts...
I had a similar problem on an earlier hubitat firmware release. I found that if I hit the back button on my browser the devices had completed but the browser just wasn't refreshing.
Thank you for your help. Please excuse my ignorance, but how do you update the firmware when you cannot connect the device in the first place? Thanks again!
First, take a look at this thread where someone had a very similar problem and worked with support to solve it, he list things that may cause it:
Once you are able to include the devices on your hub (as I mentioned, the firmware update should not make a difference in pairing, that is probably unrelated), then you can gracefully shut down the hub, plug the stick on your computer and use the HomeSeer Z-Flash software (you'll need to buy a license) to upgrade their firmware, look at this post a better explanation of how to do that:
The right driver to use is the "Generic Z-Wave Smart Switch" which is the one meant to be used for the DZ15S as they are Z-Wave Plus. That said, although they work fine with this driver they do not currently differentiate between physical and digital actions and report all as digital. @mike.maxwell is aware and will correct this in a future release. If you don't care about that then use it and it will eventually report properly. If you do care, use the "Generic Z-Wave Switch", it also works fine although meant for non Plus devices and does report physical vs digital fine, then switch it to the smart one once it gets fixed...
Great! Thanks very much.
Please forgive my ignorance, but should all my zwave plus devices be "digital", or "smart"?
What about my Ecolink Contact sensors which are z-wave plus?
What about my Kwikset door locks which are zwave plus?
In essence, I'm asking "what does digital mean?"
Z-Wave Dimmers and Switches use the Generic Z-Wave Driver, these devices do not report status change (for example when you push the button manually) but their status needs to be polled in a regular basis so the hub knows they have changed and show the right status, there is a "Z-Wave Poller" app for that.
Z-Wave Plus Dimmers and Switches do have the ability to report to the Hub when their status change so a new driver was written for them with this capability, those are the ones that have "Smart" in the name.
Furthermore, some Plus switches and dimmer (like the Leviton ones) are able to also report if the change was originated digitally (from the hub or an app or an automation) or physically (from someone manually pushing the button)
As far as I know this "Smart" classification only applies to Switches and Dimmers. For other devices, check the list of officially supported devices to find out what driver to use:
I have 50+ Leviton dimmers working fine with the smart generic dimmer since it was updated. They report physical and digital interactions virtually instantaneously.
The firmware update is totally needed unless you want to use the "non-smart" driver and get updates via polling which is all that can be done for the older z-wave (non-plus) devices.
The only source of the firmware upgrade I can find is HomeSeer (unless you are a Leviton installer). Painful but necessary if you have invested in what are otherwise great dimmers. See the link for more info.
But, if you don't need to distinguish between a digital press and a physical press, why bother to change the firmware?
By the way, these are my favourite switches!
Reasons:
Instant response
zwave plus means a much greater distance
On the switch itself, you can tell if it has been excluded from a zwave network
On the switch itself, you can tell if it has been included into a zwave network
The firmware fixes a couple of nasty problems where they stop sending updates or respond at all and need to be power cycled to fix, easy with the air gap on the dimmers but for switches you need to play with your breaker box, ugh..
Also, if you have 3-way setups manually turning on/off on the matching remote does not trigger a status update on the main unit (hail command) so the hub shows the wrong status until polled.
How fast of a response do you tend to see with instant? I notice the UI will update in ~1s for me, but using Simple Lighting, I'll see a delay of another second between pressing the switch, and seeing an action in devices.
Using the web UI seems to be much faster for both of these, and I'm wondering if you experience the same issues?
