For the past several months I've had an odd delay with my Zooz zwave light switches. A few times a day all switches would stop responding for 2-3 minutes. No ghost entries or anything else I saw obvious. I 1st tried to narrow down the circumstances preceding the delay and noticed it nearly always happened when I went into the attached garage. The garage has two motion sensors and a zooz switch. Room lighting is set up for motion activation of the light.
So I started troubleshooting.
Operating the switch manually did not cause the delay.
Operating the light via the device or the room lighting app also did not cause the delay.
One at a time I removed the 2 motion sensors (one zwave and one is zigbee). The delay still occurred with either sensor completely removed from the hub.
I decided it must be the older Zooz switch so I replaced it with one of the new 800 series LR Zooz switches. The delay was still there.
I thought maybe it could be the room lighting app so I deleted the one for the garage motion lighting and recreated it as a "simple automation rule". The delay was still there.
I could not think of anything else to test. Then one day I was looking through the zwave details again and finally found the cause. I noticed the zwave siren had not responded since February even though it said the battery was at 22%. I checked it and yes the battery was dead. Once the battery was replaced the delay went away.
What was happening is that I have a rule that sends a beep to the siren when an exterior door opens. The door from the garage to the house is included. Whenever I opened that door (or any other exterior door) the hub would try to send a beep to the siren and get stuck trying to reach it, causing all zwave devices to stop working for a couple minutes until it gave up.
Sharing this in case anyone runs into something similar.
Thanks, I had the battery monitor app installed, but that does not help when the battery level is still showing a level above 0. I could set it to alert below a higher %, but activity would be a better thing to report on. I set up the activity app now to monitor all my battery powered device.
I just found out today that you need both battery level and activity, myself. I have a Zooz Multi-sensor that started reporting a battery level of 2% a couple days ago. I kept meaning to go change the battery but it wasn't showing up in my activity monitor so I thought I still had a day or two. Turns out it stopped reporting everything but it's very low battery level. Since it was reporting battery it wasn't listed in my no activity report.
Normally I start getting a low battery level and then some time later I will get a no activity for a device. If it is not a critical device I wait for it to die before I change the battery. Trying to limit my battery usage somewhat. Probably doesn't help but....
ZWave has horribly poor resilience and I regret installing ZWave products in my smart home. Any glitch anywhere in the mesh, and this seems to happen to me also. I havent been able to track it down to a specific device. No ghosts, very minimal use of encryption, nearly all devices have a direct connection to the hub. Yet I have NEVER had good reliability with my C7 or my C8pro from the ZWave radio. I end up doing a shutdown and cutting power for 30 seconds once a week to get the radio to hopefully behave for a while. It's pathetic. ZWave needs to die. The Zigbee side of my network is always flawless.
Zigbee is hardly flawless, witness the several threads of late, including mine, on post power outage performance. Z-wave is being re-invigorated by long range. The mesh is dead, long live long range.
I have had staff look at my hub engineering logs multiple times. On the C7 hub as well as on the C8 Pro. Never a solution to this. Zwave details page was posted a few times. I have spent years fixing every single flaw that anyone could even hint at. I have tons of repeaters everywhere. I live in a rural area without much of any radio interference. Constant random issues. For example, random Zwave switches will just ignore their command (direct connected to the hub!) the first time, and then maybe work again the second time around. Usually I just get what I consider to be excuses. For example, I have door and window contact sensors which use S0 encryption. They work flawlessly (except when the ZWave radio glitches, which takes everything down). I'll get excuses like "you should remove all of them and see if that helps". Not an option and not reasonable at all. Anyway, no rudeness intended to anyone here trying to help. It is just very frustrating and I have given up on it. ZWave is a scam - it has "features" that break the mesh (like encryption).I have never had Zigbee fail on me in any capacity ever in years of using Hubitat. Before anyone says it, no there are no ghost nodes. I had them years ago and purchased a ZWave stick (since the Hubitat is not capable of fixing ghost nodes most of the time!) to remove them.
Certainly sounds good. It's just that I spent so much money for the sensors, switches, etc that I already have. I hate to reward them for a flawed product by spending more money. I will say that the reliability has improved a lot over the years and with all of the "fixes" that shouldn't be needed. Right now I've gone a full week without power cycling the zwave radio and with very minimal glitches.
