We've been renovating our 2nd floor and I've decided to replace all the switches upstairs with Zooz Zen-23's (and 2 GE switches for the bathroom fans). Also have a few MultiSensor6's for motion light activation. I was able to pair the devices - I did have some difficulty doing so with a few of them. I may also have inadvertently created "ghost" devices due to my tendency to "force remove" and then use my Aeotect Z-Wave stick to exclude things when issues arose. Also there seems to be no easy way to check for and remove "ghosts" short of pulling the HE stick and running one of the apps mentioned in another post. Kind of nervous about trying that as I'm just knowledgeable and impatient enough to be dangerous.
For now my system is terribly slow to react at times - I have a group called "upstairs" that has 14 lights in it. When I click "on" sometimes all the lights come on after a minute or so sometimes only some of them do - but it is not a speedy process. Interestingly the Zigbee stuff seems to work much better/faster. Since the switches are spread out all over the upstairs and I have ones on our first floor I don't think it's a signal/repeat issue - I could be wrong of course and it's hard to tell there as well. Maybe I should get some Aeon Repeaters just in case.
I ran a Z-Wave repair again last night and this morning my hub was offline (red light). After a powercycle it came back up.
Not sure where to go with this.. I've emailed support a couple of times but have not gotten a response. To be fair this didn't seem like a big issue until this morning so my queries may have been assigned a lower priority AND I figure they are really busy.
If anyone has any advice on how to troubleshoot this - Since I now have over 100 devices + a bunch of rules etc simply resetting things now would be a really painful option. Properly managing a system with a large # of devices/rules/apps is also something I hope the HE folks are factoring in as this platform with great potential progresses.
This is probably the source of your problems. Can you go through the poorly responding group device by device from the device pages to find which devices are perhaps not responding as they should?
JD Roberts posted an article about how to build out a Z-Wave mesh network. Impatience is your enemy in how you do this.
Yeah kinda realizing that now. I just had a ton of devices to install all at once which was kind of tedious (not HE's fault at all). Will review the stuff - thanks again.
How will I know about potential ghost nodes though?
Also I may still have to wait for things to settle down a bit. The hub crash last night was unnerving though.
If at all possible, I recommend picking up an Aeon Minimote if you can find it. It makes including and excluding devices a breeze.
edit: Nevermind, I see you have a Z-Stick, so you can use that for excluding things.
Not sure about ghost nodes, but if you believe you truly have a problem somewhere, it might be difficult/impossible to pin down with 100+ devices. Force removing things can make things sticky real fast. You might consider rebuilding everything from scratch, carefully following the aforementioned guides and having a better vision of your completed Z-Wave backbone. It might take a little longer to start over, but you'll be eliminating future problems. Building a solid Z-Wave mesh is like stacking a deck of cards. An invisible deck of cards at that.
Yeah, trying to avoid that if possible. I have the Aeotec Z-Stick which may have gotten me into this mess. Exclusion is really easy to do..maybe too easy.
I wonder if it would be a good idea to have 2 hubs - one for my basement and one for the 2nd floor?
That probably wouldn't be necessary - Plug-in and hardwired Z-Wave devices route messages through each other, and unless your house is the size of a football field it should have no problem getting from one floor to the next. You'll need at least a couple repeaters in between.
If you want to try process of elimination you can begin excluding the repeater devices furthest away from the hub one by one and see if response improves. You'll have to run a Z-Wave Repair after every few changes, but it's not something you want to rush through.
The thing is I have a bunch of Z-Wave devices on my first floor - they are mostly older Z-Wave not Plus. I had to relocate my hub to the basement (in the rafters / central location) in order for my Yale lock to work properly. Was just thinking that maybe 2 might work better - one to control the 2nd floor then be controlled by the main hub in the basement. Also the 2nd floor hub would be primarily for the Z-Wave plus devices.
Trying to figure out a way to make this as stable and reliable as possible.
Z-Wave and Z-Wave plus devices can talk to each other with no problem. The main differences are range and battery life. I have a mix of both in my house of 2 floors and a basement. You should treat your nonplus devices the same as your plus devices, with the exception of maybe choosing a Plus in range-sensitive situations like a mailbox at the end of your driveway.
Think of it like a spiderweb. Each repeater passes the message to the next one and back to the hub. They all rely on each other for passing messages. When you run a Z-Wave repair each device the hub builds a table of which devices are closest to each other based on how quickly they respond to each other in an effort to optimize speed. If you have a bunch of ghost nodes, it's like throwing a wrench in the system because they're trying to talk to the ghost nodes, and they aren't repeating, so your whole mesh gets hung up.
Yes that makes sense. The trouble is I can remove the new upstairs devices but that would not take care of the issue. I am now looking at removing and resetting everything. I would really NOT like to do that if possible. Also going forward this is not a good thing for people to have to do if they have a bunch of devices say more than 50 or so.. (I have over 100 and counting).
I had that problem previously for the recessed door sensors..so have been pretty careful. Only my Z-Wave locks (basement door and a test lock) are running secure.
I guess I wouldn't have to reset everything just the Z-Wave stack and then use the Aeon stick to manually exclude the devices. The pain is I have some behind the switch and embedded in light assembly relays that I have to access..
I wouldn't do that yet.
Have you contacted support?
I would drop an email to support@hubitat.com
We can have a look at your internal error logs to see if there is any obvious node causing problems before resetting everything.
(It may only be one or two causing the whole network to be dragged down)
I did - couple of times over the past few days but they have not responded yet. Sometimes the replies get shunted to spam and I miss them but I don't see anything today. Also I had reported something earlier this week about missing Z-wave devices on reboot but that was resolved before I needed a response from them so maybe that's confusing the issue.
It would be nice if we could get an automated reply from support acknowledging an email request so you'd know it went thru at least - though it's a potential spam vector unless validated against registered users.
You could potentially run a Z-Wave Repair and sit and watch the logs. If the repair tries to contact a nodes that isn't in your list, that's a problem. I'm not sure if it would show though. If you find out what they are I don't know how to remove those nodes. It used to be with ST you could create a virtual device with the same ID, then remove it, but I don't know if it works that way with HE.
