I have 6 devices that "I think" are on my Z-Wave network. They all have a "discover" button on their row in the Z-wave settings screen which makes me think they are NOT part of my network. However, it shows that they route through some of my existing devices. I'm very confused how to interpret this.
Is there a good method for tracking these down and eliminating them? Should I bother eliminating them?
Thanks for any help or advice you can provide. Additional details in attached screenshots.
These are what we refer to as "ghosts" and they need to go. Ghosts are usually the result of an incomplete pairing. They aren't usable and they can cause real headaches, including preventing pairing new devices and really slow response times.
They can be a bit tricky to exorcise. Each one of them usually corresponds to a "real" device that WAS paired successfully. Usually, but not always, the "real" device is the next one on the list. In your example, it is likely that node 6 is a ghost of node 7, 0B is a ghost of 0C, and so on. To get rid of node 6, you first must ensure that node 7 is unreachable. The easiest way to do it is to remove power to whatever node 7 actually is. Once power has been removed from the "real" device, click "repair" on the ghost device until a "remove" button appears, then click "remove" until the device goes away. Be patient. It can take a while. If you run into issues there are a number of things you can try but see how it goes first.
Once you've gotten rid of them all, best practice is to check your zwave details page after you include each new device. If you do accidentally create a ghost you can get rid of it immediately.
Looking at the last few words of the Class Type: "POWER_SWITCH_BINARY" woul mean it's a ZWave switch and you have several of them in between and after the fails.
Experience allows us to guess you were unsuccessful at Including the switch and it took 2-3 tries. You were eventually successful and didn't look back.
Those failed Includes were partially successful... and left behind a 'ghost' (or Phantom.) You will want to get rid of those. When they get as far as displaying a Discover button, then they are very likely to be unstable in your Mesh.
@ForceBlast As said they need to do. If you know the devices that created them, you could disconnect power to that device then hit the refresh button on that line then click remove. If that doesn't work you will need a z-wave stick. Your mesh will not function correctly with those ghosts.
Follow these instructions
Thanks for the advice. I followed your steps and so far I have gotten the "Remove" button to appear. However, I've been clicking "Remove" here and there for over an hour and it's still not gone. I also tried rebooting the hub including removing the power to the hub for a couple mins. Very odd that I can't get rid of it. I'll keep trying. Is it typical for it to take over an hour for one ghost node?
Thank you for the advice. I happened to have a Z-Wave stick lying around so I tried to grab the Simplicity Studio tools. I'm on Mac and the Z-Wave PC Controller tool says it only works for Windows whenever I try to launch it.
I think I'm going to skip this option. The tools seem very heavy for what I'm trying to do. I'm surprised there isn't a lighter-weight tool for this purpose. I wonder if one could be built using something like this: Z-Wave JS - Z-Wave driver written entirely in JavaScript/TypeScript. I might play around with that and see what I can come up with.
Regardless, I appreciate your help. If I were on Windows I could probably make better use of it.
Thank you. I'll do my best to remove them.
You need to power off the devices that created them first, then reboot the hub, then click remove.
Correct. You can run it in a VM and get a windows demo. If you can remove it like we pointed out above you will need simplicty studio to do it. Until those ghosts are gone you're mesh will be toast. The only other option is to reset your z-wave radio then reset all the devices and then re pair.
Please read this post....It will help you along in things.
But you can only do this on the newer hubs, right?
Correct. Only the C-7. It has a different z-wave stack to go along with the 700-series z-wave radio.
For the C-5 and older, it is still necessary to use something like PC Controller to remove ghosts.
OK, I'll have a look around for info
Thanks
Thanks again for your help. I managed to get rid of 3 ghosts using the methods suggested above but 3 of them were really stubborn.
I booted up an old Windows PC I had pretty much decommissioned and was preparing to recycle I managed to get it working with the stick.
Following this guide with the stick was the only way I was able to get rid of the final 3 ghosts. Thanks so much for providing it. My mesh is now ghost free!
You can always run parallels on mac with a demo of windows to acomplish this if you need to again
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Download the Hubitat app
