Physical Events Not Logging Consistently

While I have automated as much as I can, my family still has to touch a light switch every now and then. :open_mouth:

I have 33 devices moved over to Hubitat from ST, 29 GE switches and 4 Iris motions, with 70+ more to switch. I noticed that physical events are not being logged consistently for my devices. I may get an on event, but may never get an off. This is very problematic for my shower light where I have a simple rule that looks for the on event to also turn on the exhaust fan switch.

Anyone else having similar issues? My GE switches are not Plus models if that makes a difference and they are all using the generic Zwave switch/dimmer drivers. I don’t believe it’s a mesh issue because they turn on and log events immediately via web browser.

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I had to setup a refresh rule that triggers off of motion to get the GE switches to refresh for physical…

Thank you for confirming its not just me!

@bravenel, @mike.maxwell, @bobbyD, @coreylista are you all aware of this issue and possibly addressing it in a future release?

I am not sure how ST solutioned it, but physical events were being logged and that is something I will be utilizing quite a bit as I migrate more devices over to Hubitat.

It was being logged but I assure it you was not an instantaneous report either.

I am seeing the same problem of no physical events on my GE Z-Wave Dimmer switch (deviceType 18756).

4 out of 5 my non-dimmer GE Z-Wave Switches seem to report physical updates reliably. The 4 that report physical updates reliably have a deviceType of 21079. The one that does not update has a deviceType of 18770.

I wonder if some versions are more reliable at reporting physical events?

My 21079 GE switches unfortunately don’t report physical events reliably. Those are most of the switches in my house, except bathroom lights where I use dimmers. Those are 17495 and 18756. Then I have 5 GE outlets, 21074, that are automated based on time of day but I just tested and physical presses of the button aren’t registered.

I do have a new “no load” switches that I haven’t removed from ST yet that won’t work with this issue. Basically I have a Smart Lighting rule that toggles a GE outlet based on the physical state of a wall switch.

@bobbyD can you please confirm whether this is a known issue and something you may be working on?

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I am sorry to beat a dead horse with this one but I am away for the weekend and not having up to date switch status is a huge problem. My housekeeper came late yesterday and left a ton of lights on, heard it from a neighbor. In Hubitat I had to view every switch and click refresh to figure out which switches were on. As mentioned my house is all GE switches and I have 25 moved over and another 50 or so more.

Can someone from Hubitat please confirm this issue is in your plans to address? Do you have any suggestions of a work around until that happens? My family still physically turns on/off switches everyday.

I setup a rule for my master bathroom that has a motion sensor to execute a custom refresh command. My issue with this is I have a ton of events for these switches because each refresh execution is logged. I prefer to keep my event logs clean with actual changes. Is there any other command I can run that won’t log an event but will update the on/off state value?

Here is my rule for input.

I set up a Periodic Rule Machine rule to issue a refresh() command every minute on all of my problem GE Z-Wave switches (3 of 7) as a temporary workaround. Not pretty, but effective for now.

I would also like to know if Hubitat engineers are looking into this. I don’t recall this being an issue on ST, but I could be mistaken.

Thanks. I am doing that based on motion where I have motion sensors but I don’t have them everywhere. This is honestly keeping me from moving forward with my migration away from ST since my house is full of these devices. This is definitely not happening in ST as I know they poll the devices quite frequently.

@mike.maxwell @bravenel is this on your radar to address in a future release. Is there any other command I can issue on the devices other than refresh to get the state? I ask because I use the event history and refresh logs an entry on every execution and this is filling up the logs with unnecessary rows. I can appreciate that this is likely a tricky thing to solve and I am just looking for work arounds. I really want to move more devices over but this issue is stopping that. SmartTiles isn’t very useful without accurate status. Thanks!

Actually, this is the first i’ve heard of this issue. We will investigate.

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Thanks. I am happy to open a support incident if you want me to. Most of my GE switches are the old v1 version, not Zwave Plus. But I do have several Plus fan controls that are not updating physical status either.

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I found this old post from ST Community that might shed some light on how/why SmartThings handles physical events from GE/Jasco switches:

Delayed actions... need help - developers - SmartThings Community

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Looks like it major issue for me as well.
From 70+ devices I migrated so far is about half of them
Jasco Zigbee Dimmers

  • endpointId: 01
  • application: 12
  • model: 45857
  • manufacturer: Jasco Products

Example: This will not run

Also, My Canary Cree light bulb doesn't return real on/off value
so this doesn't work either:

Thanks for posting further details! @bravenel and @chuck.schwer contacted me yesterday via PM so Hubitat engineering is definitely aware and investigating a solution.

Is there anything one can do if every switch action is shown as “digital”, no matter whether I do it physically or remotely?
Is this a device limitation or could it possibly be fixed via device driver? Any way I can get my hands on the generic Z-wave switch device driver code so I can mess around with it?

Just reporting that I see the issue as well.

I can turn on/off GE Z-Wave Switches and Dimmers within hubitat, but no log appears whatsoever. In addition, Physical presses do not show up in the log and consequently cannot trigger rules.

FWIW my Zigbee Generic dimmer reports logs just fine.

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Which driver did you use for this device?
We have a generic zigbee switch driver, but not a dimmer driver.
Can you try the generic zigbee switch driver and see if it reports physical? If it does I should be able to create a dimmer driver for these...
There is a zigbee dimmer driver but it looks suspect...

I'm using
ZigBee Dimmer System
I changed it to
Generic Zigbee Switch System
still no joy.

Based on this


It will probably take some extra effort to solve it.

I have a ge zigbee dimmer headed my way to tune a driver for it, we already support the ge zigbee switch which reports correctly.

It should be noted that ge has both zigbee and zwave devices. The older non reporting zwave devices require polling to retreive their status, due to ge not wanting to pay the licensing to Lutron, we are reviewing options to resolve this.

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