Major Zwave issues after power outage

I wonder if having some devices on backed up circuits might cause new routes to be developed in those three hours the generator was on, which screwed things up when utility power was restored. And what's with those "repeaters", whatever they are? Could they be a factor, somehow?

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This surprised me...I only have GE/Jasco/Honeywell switches and dimmers (edit - paddle style), and every one of them has an air gap switch on it. Are you sure you don't on yours?

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The dimmers do have air gap. The on/off toggles do not. Paddles do, just not toggles. No idea why they made that decision, but yeah I'm sure. I also have about 20 Jasco receptacles which also have no air gap.

Wow...new news, did not know that about the toggles. That sucks...

If a Zniffer would be helpful I have one I can loan. Not mine to give away, it's on loan to me, but I can be w/out it for a while if needed. :slight_smile:

I actually have a zwave toolbox also on loan to me, but I appreciate the offer. Unfortunately though I'm running out of free time to invest in trying to troubleshoot this. I spent a considerable amount of time today following @bobbyd's suggestions. I did pull the air gap on everything that had it and I turned off as many breakers as I reasonably could (things like the dryer which has an HEM and is on it's own circuit I figured I'd kill those types of things). I also turned off as many breakers that are newer additions to the house where I knew they were sanely wired (like where I know the breaker just controls one room not random stuff all over the place). I went and re-powered on each device one by one and did an individual Repair. I could get 6-7 devices at a time, then the hub would just die again and report that nodes were unreachable. I'd shutdown, power down, start up, get another 6-7. It stayed stable for an hour or two and now I'm back to the same issue. All devices report status update to the hub instantly (if I flip a switch, HE instantly updates the device page) -- which to me proves there is communication happening, but if I try to send any command, nada. Power it down for a bit and it works great for another hour or so then the same story. Not even for a device that I physically brought 6in from the hub. I'm not sure what else to try. Any other time that this happened (which has now been 4 other times) I've had to rebuild the mesh from scratch and I'm not really open to doing that again. Open to suggestions, but I'm out of ideas.

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That is just untenable...given all you've contributed to this community and ultimately to Hubitat functionality and customer satisfaction and loyalty, if I were Bruce I'd ship an engineer to your house to restore things.

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Haha, unfortunately, I don't think they have a magic bullet here. People here say it all the time, the SI chip just doesn't seem to be up to snuff in some cases. I know it's working just great for many people, I don't really know what's unique about my setup (I wish I did because I'd try to change it!) But I think the only people who can fix these issues are the engineers from SI who have access to the actual firmware.

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Good call out. I've never had their switches break, but their receptacles break all the time during power outages. This power outage took out 4(!!!) of them. That's a record for me, it usually kills 1-2. I keep half a dozen on hand just for this situation, then when they break I call up GE who replaces them with nothing more than a photo of the date code (the fact that they'll accept devices from as far back as 2017, no questions asked, says they know they have a problem). So yeah, that is one more variable, I had to swap out 4 devices during this.

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The Air gap is there to cut power from the load (for safe bulb changing). I've never been sure the air gap turns off the dimmer radio or just the output.

Just be aware of the possibility the air gap may not turn off the radio.

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Good question. I don’t know. I’ve never used the air tap before. I only did it since Bobbyd suggested it.

At least on the older zwave ge/jasco switches, it cut power to the radio; polling would fail, which I interpret to indicate the radio was unpowered.

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If it wasn't for repair failing, I would have been inclined to say that this may not be a Z-Wave radio issue. Still not 100% convinced that it is, so we'd like to take a look at your hub's engineering log, if that's ok.

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Go for it!

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Honestly it sounds like you have a corrupt z-wave database (not your main database)... That can be caused by certain chatty devices. Do you have any zooz stuff in there?

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I do. But wouldn’t the cloud zwave restore have overwritten the zwave db? I thought that’s pretty much how the cloud restore works?

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Kills power to the switch - it won't control lights/circuits it's connected to, and won't broadcast at all. Essentially like killing it from the circuit breaker.

Well, that’s what I thought, too, but this may be the case of two people (you and me) opining without definitive knowledge of the facts. I only speak authoritatively about code I wrote unless I can view all the source.

That said, regardless of how cloud Z-Wave restore works, because you have a cloud backup to restore, seems like you could blow everything away with a full (not soft) reset to factory defaults and do a cloud backup restore to that.

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Except for your zigbee devices... which I think would have to be re-paired though they would slide gracefully back into their existing slots, so to speak.

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I am far from a Zwave expert, but my understanding is once the radio is corrupted, that is it. Maybe @bobbyD or @bcopeland could confirm?

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@dman2306 Could you humor us and post a screenshot of your Zwave details page? Or better yet, a screenshot using Tony Fleisher's Zwave Mesh tool? I would be curious if there is something in there we could see that might be the root cause of all this.

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Yeah but the cloud back up only goes back so far... If the z-wave db was corrupt when it was backed up, the backup databases are going to be corrupt too (not like the regular platform db which is cleaned on backup)

Now at this point likely a full reset of the z-wave radio is needed. But even with that, if you have those devices on your mesh that corrupted it in the first place will likely corrupt it again. The worst thing about it is regardless of who it is (HE, HA, Etc, ) With the current way the z-wave sdk is, it would still be corrupted by those devices. It's not just a hubitat thing, it's a 700 series chip thing.

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