Over the last few weeks I have been having frustrating stability issues. About twice a day the hub stops responding and then recovers in a burst of responses. I've rebooted and I upgraded to the latest firmware. Today after rebooting I had several Z-wave switches stop responding. About 10 minutes later they were fine.
I checked my logs for any devices that might be hogging the CPU of the hub and couldn't find any. The only thing I have changed is I added 4 more Z-Wave lights so I'm wondering if I have pushed my aging C-5 over the limit or not. I counted and I have 78 Z-wave devices. I use Zigbee on channel 20 but I only have 11 devices.
The app integrations I use are resource intensive especially the Ring unofficial app and Echo speaks. I also use Harmony and Hue integrations that seem to gobble a lot of memory. Other apps include Alexa integration, my own HousePanel, and Sonos. I had a Hubdino integration that was also a CPU hog so I dumped it because I wasn't using it anyways. I am also a heavy user of Rule Machine and Room LIghting but they all seem well behaved after checking the logs.
I'm not a newbie to smart home tech so when I say I'm stumped that means I've tried all the easy stuff like Z-Wave repairs and hub reboots and inspected my Z-Wave table for anything weird - although I confess I don't really know what weird means in the Z-Wave table, but no errors and no ghost nodes show up.
Any suggestions? Any chance I'm maxing out my C-5? I'm assuming there is no easy way to migrate to a C-7 if I were to upgrade other than the usual slog of excluding all devices and including them into the new hub? I'm doing another Z-Wave repair now am praying it helps. Will report back - but hoping others have ideas that might help.
I had 3 ghost nodes and 5 stranded nodes on my C-5. None of them showed up in the z-wave table. But they showed up with Z-Wave Toolkit, and I removed them using PC Controller.
FWIW every time I’ve added a new device (I’m running all zwave on c7) I’ve had stability issues. I’ve also done all the song and dance to try get back to normal but I think it just needs time to work itself out. Otherwise the best luck I’ve had to try to speed up the process is opening breakers on the effected switches
This is good to know. I will just give it some time. So far tonight things seem better but we'll see.
[edit] it was terrible tonight. My lighting apps triggered 20 seconds after motion. It is unusable in its current state. Never had this awful experience before. @bravenel have any suggestions?
I rebooted and things work again but as before it will degrade quickly so something is amuck.
If you subscribe to hub protect you can migrate your hub to a C7 and this would include Zwave but not Zigbee.
I have 79 Zwave devices but I also run multiple hubs to offload processing. Knowing you have resource intensive apps you might consider migrating to a C7 via Hub Protect and then use your C5 to run these apps especially the LAN integration ones.
I have 112 z-wave devices in my primary home mesh. I have experienced the same issues from time to time and believe they can be caused by a few different things. Ghost nodes can be a problem along with failing devices. I exclusively use GE/Jasco devices and there have been a bunch that have failed at random times. This was a well known issue with a particular year and batch... As mentioned many times around the forums, GE/Jasco has been good about replacing them...
However, most of the time those devices failed with a power surge or flip of the breaker... So you mentioned adding some devices... When you powered back on your mains, could one or two of your switches have failed? When they fail, usually the blue LED steadily blinks and you can sometimes hear clicking in the device itself...
Because it is no longer reachable in the mesh, it has essentially become a ghost... Not the usual ghost, because the hub still has a valid node for it... But if its unreachable, its a ghost and can cause havoc...
My understanding of the C7 vs C5 is only a z-wave radio upgrade to the 700 series... There is a lot of value in that alone because of the extra things you can see and do as mentioned above. But a move to a C7 won't really help in terms of more processing ability...
I migrated from my C5's to C7's to take advantage of the newer radios and I'm glad I did... The process was not that bad and I was able to manually add in my 60+ zigbee devices pretty easily... The z-wave move was simple... The newer 700 radio support really does let you see more into what is going on with your z-wave mesh...
Anyway, the other thing I have found is just some z-wave devices are better than others. I removed older z-wave thermostats a while back because they were causing problems... Can't say exactly how, but removing them at the time really helped...
That is the case for C7 hubs. For previous models ghosts and stranded nodes do not show up. They are supposed to be removed automatically, however, most often they are not, so they are lingering in the mesh causing all sorts of latency and instability.
Overstressing the hub often comes from uncontrolled power reporting. Most of the newer switches have power reporting capabilities. If the parameter for the power reporting is off and the switch reports power in the background, even though the driver may not show it, then you can quickly run up the bandwidth.
Thanks all - I will spend some time looking for power reporting and older Z-wave devices and will remove them. Will also look into upgrading to C7. Something has to give because the mesh has become useless - this morning lights didn't work, shades stalled for 45 seconds, and my zwave lock took 3 minutes to respond. I don't know how to find and remove ghost nodes with my C5 hub. The toolkit isn't available on the zwave website. I'll search the forum for tips.
oh man... I can't get the SI tool to work for me. Tried my Mac and my PC. The Mac gets further but it ignores all the installs so I never get the Manage Installed Packages option. The PC gives me a blank window for login no matter what I tried. Seems quite buggy - maybe i have a bad JRE installed. Anyway I can't get it going. Are there other zwave sniffer options?
I used their Mac download ... it acted like it wanted to work, but it didn't. Probably because I have the M1 chip version. Anyway the PC version is worse - it won't even show me the login screen. The window is presented but it is blank. Rebooted and same thing.
