New to HE - GE Zwave Plus switches

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1

Hi there. New to HE, got my hub up and running yesterday. I am finishing building a new home and have installed over 50 GE Z-wave smart switches and dimmers. I went through pairing them yesterday and was successful with 49 devices. I have 5-6 switches/dimmers that will not pair or be discovered by HE. These are brand new switches all bought at the same time. Distance doesn't seem to be the problem as 3 of the switches are within 10' of the hub. I had no problem pairing switches 2 stories above. I have rebuilt the Z-wave network twice and have tried to factory reset the switches based on the steps found online.

Any insight would be appreciated.

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Welcome to the community!!
You might try to shut down the hub through the interface. Once the hub light goes red, pull power for 30 seconds and power it on again.

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My recommendations (in general) for zwave pairing issues:

  1. Reboot hub
  2. Factory reset device (if possible)
  3. If #2 not possible, exclude device with HE.
  4. If #3 not possible, exclude with an external zwave controller (zstick, SmartThings, other).
  5. Re-try pairing

I have probably 70 GE zwave plus dimmers/switches/motion dimmers/motion switches/outdoor outlets. In the end I've always been able to get them to pair - never had a defective device yet.

Now, that doesn't mean that it is impossible to have a few defective devices.... Anything can happen in manufacturing.

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How do all these z-wave compare to lutron’s clear connect system in terms of reliability and speed?

I have 9 z-wave devices total and the rest of the house is Lutron. I never have issues with Lutron, but I have issues with z-wave.

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Lutron's radio system is the fastest and most reliable. I think pretty much everyone agrees with that. But it is the most expensive, and requires proprietary hubs too. And (subjectively) the wall switches are ugly as hell if you like traditional paddle style switches, or want your wall switches to all match....

That said, I really never have issues with my zwave plus devices - and I have a ton of them...

So everyone's experience is different.

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You don’t experience delays? Sometimes devices not turning on or off ?

Maybe it’s because I need more devices ?

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No delay to speak of. Typically a few hundred milliseconds from issuing the command to getting the device report back to hubitat. Since I wrote user drivers for most of my GE devices, I've looked at response time in detail.

I can't remember the last time I've had a device not turn on or off, either, that wasn't due to hub issues. Years?

But, if the zwave mesh is bad (due to interference [baby monitors, old 900 MHz phones, etc], not enough devices for a good mesh, bad routing, saturated mesh due to chatty/misbehaving zwave device, etc) then response times can go up dramatically from retransmission needs.

And if you have NON zwave plus GE devices, that's a whole different story... Those suck. But standard (non plus) zwave sucks in general due to the castration of status reporting.

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