I have recently moved over from IRIS and enjoying the Hubitat platform.
I am a little confused on polling. I have about 125 devices on my system. Most are switches, outlets and plugins with a few motion sensors, smoke detectors, keypads, thermostats and garage door openers.
I'm also using the HousePanel app which is pretty cool...
Do I need to setup polling of my devices? From looking around, I see the things to consider are bandwidth, battery life and necessity... I'm learning Z-Wave Plus doesn't need it?
About 5-10% of my devices are Zigbee... How do they fit in?
I was a long time IRIS customer and many of my switches and outlets were installed over the last several years... I have no way of knowing which are older and which are plus... Unless I can figure that out from the Hubitat?
I'm hoping for a simple guide or direction if anyone can...
Thanks in advance!
Polling applies to ZWave Switches, Dimmers and Outlets. In fact, the Patent that caused vendors to NOT send status applied to Dimmers only BUT certain vendors took a 'safe path' and just left it off switches and outlets too. That Patent expired AND ZWave arrived at a different mechanism, not knowing if Lutron would allow the patent to expire. Therefore, all you need to add to ZWave Poller are the specific devices that 1) don't provide status and 2) are needed in some automation, even if that's only the Dashboard.
You can detect ZWave + via the Device Info page and near the bottom is the Data row. On there is:
inClusters: 0x5E,0 <-- 0x5E is ZWave +
So...ignore non-dimmers, non-switches, ignore ZWave plus devices, ignore devices you don't need status from, and put the rest into ZWave Poller.
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Do you have a recommendation on the polling intervals/schedule? I just looked and a vast majority of my outlets, switches and all my dimmers appear to be non plus...
Also, what about door locks? I notice issues with locks not showing the correct status sometimes. Would polling fix that? I've read about quickly draining batteries though.
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Good answer, but please note there are some zwave+ devices that still need polling:
zwave poller only works the the generic zwave type devices, so if you use another device handler, zwave poller will ignore it.
- also note rule machine will attempt to turn it on automatically if you have zwave poller installed (I plan to add this to webCoRE)
I would not poll the lock. They're different than other devices.
Also, if you happened to have added Refresh to any rules for the lock, I would remove that. I had added refresh to my unlock rule when I was having a status issue (which did nothing to help anyway). @mike.maxwell fixed the issue in the driver, but I forgot to remove refresh from the rule. The lock continued working for months until yesterday when my "lock front door" rule suddenly would not work. I simply removed refresh from the rule and it started working again.
As well, polling really increases the Z-wave mesh traffic. You have a lot of devices so I would go easy on polling, only adding what is really necessary for automations and the like.
