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.
Check your logs, events, device and app stats to see whats pouding things. If you have anything power reporting, temporarily turn it off.
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.
Hey @kewashi,
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.
Hi Ken -
This article should help.
You will need a USB z-wave stick like a UZB3 or UZB7. Or something equivalent from Zooz or Aeotec.
Will the stick that came with the first-Gen HE hub the Norteck HUSBZB-1 work?
I think it should.
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?
Definitely will not work on a Mac without an emulator of some sort (or BootCamp to Windows - if it is an Intel Mac).
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.
Thanks for this info. Like you most of my switches are GE/Jasco or UltraPro that I think Jasco also makes.
I don’t see any that are failing. They just respond really slowly. I checked logs and most show response tones under 10ms except one that is 43 ms. I will try to reset that one but even 43 ms is pretty fast.
I did two zwave repairs and another reboot and hope it helps. Will report back later.
[EDIT] Reporting an update as promised...
Disabled two power reporting z-wave devices, disabled an old ST hublink that was pinging HE, did 3 z-wave repairs, and rebooted hub. Now things seem incredibly better. Hopefully it will stay good.
[EDIT 2] I also noticed that I have some Innoveli switches and they are not as responsive as my GE/Jasco switches. I'm also suspicious that they are bad actors in the Zwave mesh. Are these on the "bad" zwave list?
No, generally they are OK. Is your firmware on the switches up-to-date? Reds? Blacks? Dimmers? Switches?
They are all Red switches - and I haven't done any firmware updates on them. Sounds like I should.
I have 4 of these Inovelli switches. Turns out I have the 1st gen Black LZW30 devices so when I tried updating one using this site's instructions I bricked the device. Nothing I tried brought it back, so I just replaced it with an UltraPro Jasco switch which is preferred anyways. I will probably replace all the others too.
As for my overall stability, things are better but still not great. I have a C7 hub on order that shows up from Amazon tomorrow. Also have a Zooz zwave stick coming so I can use the tool. I got the tool working on an older Win10 laptop I had laying around. My Win11 desktop refused to work with it for some reason, and the Mac was hopeless.
Once I get the C7 hub I will need help figuring out how to move over just the Z-Wave and Zigbee stuff without also moving over the Internet integrations. I will read up on hub mesh in the meantime.
Odd, it shouldn't have let you do that. Usually the firmware has to match before it will attempt a flash.
That being said, I did flash an old NZW Inovelli with the wrong firmware one time, and it bricked the switch. (I ignored warnings and was using a non-standard method to flash) Simply puling the airgap on the switch and reflashing with the correct firmware brought it back. So maybe in the spirit of Monty Python's parrot, it isn't dead yet.
Download the Hubitat app
