That's typical for Z-Wave... The hub sends a command and waits for a response. Locks are a bit slow to wake up and and respond.. The Schlage FE599 handle locks are the quickest and usually respond in the UI within 1-2 seconds. I can issue commands to the entire group of 4 and they'll all respond very quickly. The BE468/469 are terrible and a poorly designed product. On their best day the 4 I have in service right now take at least 5-7 seconds longer.
It sounds like you dealt with it in a similar way. I have done two things.. For things like presence changes, I use RM to issue the lock commands for the FE599s with a 3 second delay between each one. The BE468/9 locks are on a different hub, but for those I use a 10 second delay between each command. That seems to wok very well for me. Having two hubs helps adds parallellism given the number of locks controlled.
I had these issues on SmartThings too, except worse. ST sends a Z-Wave command and waits until it's ACK'd.. If the ACK doesn't come in within a period of time, the hub power cycles the Z-Wave chip. Meanwhile, no other Z-Wave commands are happening. I could never use locks in Routines. I always had to use my own app to delay and manage the locks.
One final thought, in the case of presence, I delay all non-lock related Z-Wave actions by a full 90 seconds to ensure that all of the locks have had a chance to respond. Since it's more important to lock the doors than turn off the lights so those commands always go first.
I never had issues with ST and now Ring with the locks. I could not get them to pair with HE.
The way I got around the issues I was having with my Schlage locks and HE was to move the locks to Ring and then use the Unofficial Ring Integration app to control them. I have had zero issues since doing that. If you are in the market for an alarm and have the stomach to use Ring this may be something to try. The cost of the basic Ring setup and a new Schlage lock are comparable. You won't need a Ring subscription to use this setup. If Ring ever makes changes that render the Unofficial Ring Integration inoperable I guess I'll be SOL.
I'm not here to debate whether HE or Schlage is the issue. I'm just offering an option that worked in my environment.
Yup, I have Kwikset, but after hearing from people with problems with Yale and Schlage too, and we all had the same experience, even across both ST and Hubitat, I came to the conclusion that the z-wave spec for locks is just a faulty spec at its core.
I also had the problem like @neonturbo where it would lock up if I tried to do more than one lock at a time. I had this problem on both ST and HE. I ended up making my Lockdown app for Hubitat, which would space out the lock commands, ask for refreshes too, and have error correction and retries.
But still, I've ended up converting most of my z-wave Kwiksets to zigbee by switching out the chip. After conversion, I have zero problems with the converted locks. So I believe the z-wave spec is deficient for locks, and the zigbee one does it better.
Just to share my experience, I have just 1 Schlage BE469NX lock myself (FW 7.1) that is now 4 years old on my front door. I found it works way better on Hubitat than it ever did on Smartthings when I moved over to Hubitat almost 2 years ago. I can't tell you how many times I had to reboot my Smartthings Hub and reset the lock with Smartthings even though I had no problems with any other Z-Wave device. This is even when my Hubitat hub was in the same location as my Smartthings Hub I noticed a huge difference since switching to Hubitat nearly 2 years ago.
I was having battery a little bit of drain issues with my lock though I noticed and looking at suggestions I found by others on this site I added 2 more Z-Wave Extenders and now it's been 6 months since then since I replaced my batteries. I also think since moving to a 3 Hub setup last year has helped a ton as well using HubConnect, that allowed me to split up the devices on 2 hubs (3rd hub is coordinator with HubConnect) although I kept all my Z-Wave on 1 hub still since I have way less Z-Wave than Zigbee devices.
Anyone having issues in my opinion is mesh or device related with the lock; look in the ST forums and you'll see a ton of posts of ppl having issues with the Schlage locks too so this isn't just an issue with Hubitat. I can't speak of Wink since I never owned a Wink hub, maybe Wink has a much strong Z-Wave radio or something that is causing the differences there vs Hubitat. I'm hoping Hubitat looks into the 700 series Z-Wave chip on the next hub they release, I'll probably get one if it does
Schlage locks I hate to say are just crappy Z-Wave locks, your better off getting Zigbee locks if you ever get a new lock. Schlage isn't much help either when I have called them since they can't update the firmware and won't help you when you have an older firmware. That's when I called them multiple times in the past when having issues with Smartthings.
We have removed Schlage locks from our list of compatible devices. We don't have a good solution for these locks, and we don't want anyone to be misled about them working well.
And for some people they work. We won't remove the drivers, but are going to be forthright in saying that these locks don't work for everyone, for reasons that are not known.
Man reading this thread, I’m really glad I ended up buying the Zigbee version of this same lock from Schlage. Absolute opposite experience and completely pain free.
I mostly went Zigbee for locks because of all the issues I was having with my old August Z-Wave lock. I’ve used multiple HA platforms and Z-Wave lock issues aren’t exclusive to hubitat.
Thanks. I got somewhat lucky. I took my General and in the same session took my Extra. Studied hard for the General and just read the Extra material, didn't really study it per se. I didn't need to learn CW but taught myself anyway because that is what intrigued me to begin with.
Just want to reiterate that I tried those Schlage locks on both the Iris system and the Hubitat system, and they worked the same- very very poorly. Keep fighting a poorly designed lock or cut your loss and get a Zigbee one. Don't blame Hubitat for it not working properly.
Just as a counter-datapoint, I have two BE469ZP installed (firmware 10.9) -- both are 2-3 walls and 50-70 feet from the hub, with some Inovelli switches in between the hub and the locks. Response time is reasonable and they have never failed to respond or dropped off the network.
My only complaint is that one of the two sometimes fails to report status change (nothing at all in the logs) when the thumbturn is used to lock/unlock.
I have pretty much the same experience as you. One BE469 and one BE469ZP and just the odd manual lock/unlock where a status report doesn't send. Not the end of the world but would be nice if didn't happen.
Maybe nearby radio interference with your Yale? Or maybe the distance to my hub just gives me the stability. My YRD256 With a Z-Wave Plus module has never been an issue. Mine is just 10 feet from the hub. The size of my house sort of dictates this.
I actually bought that lock originally with the intent to just learn more about Z-Wave and how it performs when there are (simulated) hub failures. Only, it was a bad choice for that because I couldn’t ever get a failure in exclusion or joining, and couldn’t make it fail. It’s too good!
Interesting to note that Savant now has an exclusive agreement with Yale and August (e.g. Assa Abloy). I know these things are almost always more about money than anything else, but it does speak volumes that a company with such demanding installations chose their locks over Schlage. It can’t be just about the deal. There’s a lot a stake with that reputation of theirs.
I assume they had no choice in the deal but to also take on August, because they’re built like a pile of crap.
