I just migrated from a C5 and C8 and the good news is that things work (mostly). The one little glitch that I'm running into is with the UltrPro switches.
I have 3 4 UltraPro switches ( UltraPro Z-Wave Smart Light Dimmer) that are not responding to on/off commands from the device page. They are linked to Apple Home via Homebridge and I can see the state change in Apple Home when I turn on the switch manually. I can also see the state change on the device page. The logs are showing the events, but the devices do not respond to any on/off commands.
One thing I noticed is that the driver is "Generic Z-Wave Plus Scene Switch". I don't remember what it was before, but it is unlikely that I would have selected a "scene controller" originally since I only use it for on/off.
EDIT 3: I tried switching to the GE Enbrighten Z-Wave Smart Dimmer driver that had apparently worked previously, but now the state change doesn't show up in HE at all (and no response to the on/off commands from the device page)
I have these and use the GE Enbrighten Z-wave Smart Dimmer driver.
If you tried switching to that, did you also hit Save, then Configure, then Save again?
There is also a firmware update; maybe the C8 needs that. Mine are on a C7
Yep - changed the driver , did the “save”, “configure”, “save” dance but no love. I also realized that I had purchased two dimmers and two switches. Tried both drivers but no luck. Do you know how I can tell them apart (physical appearance, user activated behavior)?
I’ve never updated mine. How do I get the firmware?
@rakeshg I have a house full of GE/Jasco/Enbrighten/UltraPro switches and dimmers and they don't need anything special to work on a C8 (I've had them on a C8 and C8-Pro).
The Generic Z-Wave Plus Dimmer/Switch drivers should work w/your switches, as well as @JasonJoel's excellent Z-Wave Plus Switch/Dimmer drivers (that I think you have installed).
Set your drivers to the correct Z-Wave Plus drivers (community or built in, don't forget "Configure) and then shut down your hub, pull power, wait 30s, then plug in again and boot up and see if things are better.
EDIT: Just noticed you specifically refer to the switches as Z-Wave, not Z-Wave Plus, so ignore my comment to use the "Plus" drivers if your switches/dimmers are non-Plus.
Do the shut down/pull power/wait/restart part, ,though.
Try Jason's drivers... There are two versions... One that was pre-embrighten and the other that covers the newer features of embrighten. Are your UtraPro dimmers newer?
Additionally, I've had issues with some of the GE firmware updates and actually downgraded some of my devices because features didn't work... Like @danabw said, its probably in the drivers. You may need to switch to "device" and remove states... Then install the new driver and hit configure.
Absolutely, unless something really unusual is going on - I have never updated any drivers and have GE switches going back to 2016-17 on my hubs (C7, C8, C8-Pro) w/zero issues. Always work.
If the shut down/restart doesn't help, @rakeshg, we'll need you to post a screen shot(s) of your Z-Wave Details page (all of your devices). THere is a possibilty you had some ghosts on the C5 (they don't appear, so can't see if you have them) that are causing problems now that you've moved to the C8.
@danabw@SuperDupe - Thanks for all the suggestions. I changed the driver to "Device", wiped out the states and went back to the built in GE Enbrighten Z-Wave Smart Switch and the switch is working again.
What is really strange is that in the migration, the driver somehow got changed. Has anyone had that happen? I know I did not change it and it was working on the C5 before the migration (and upgrade to the latest firmware).
@danabw - the switches and dimmers are from 2021 (so Z-Wave Plus, 500 series devices).
I doubt the driver was changed during the migration, that is saved in the hub database and all it does is make a copy of it, nothing would be modified.
Hub was probably just having a hard time reaching the devices since the migration wipes out the routing info. By fiddling with it for a while they re-established routes and work again. If you switch back to the driver you had it on before they will probably work with that now as well.
The driver was switched (see the screenshot in the first post).
I find it a little hard to believe that out of all the Z-wave devices I have, the only ones with this issue were the UltraPro ones (all 4 of them - 2 switches and 2 dimmers) and they are scattered around the house (one is directly behind the hub).
The other strange thing was that the devices WERE reporting state change (on/off) and that was being updated in Apple Home, They just would not respond to commands from the device page. Clearing out the state data by flipping the driver to "device" cleared this up without doing anything with the mesh (shut down, pull plug or repair etc.)
Yes, the route from the device to hub is independent of hub to device route. So device could reach hub, but hub was having a hard time reaching the device.
All that does is remove a data point from the device entity, nothing magical that would make the hub suddenly able to reach the device with commands.
The "Generic Z-Wave Plus Scene Switch" that you had it on before would send the EXACT same commands out to a switch as whatever one is currently working. And those switches are "scene" switches because they send button events (which is called a scene event in Z-Wave).
My point is that I did not select this driver. If you read the link in EDIT 2, I had the same issue when I paired the switches originally. The driver that was working on the C5 was "GE Enbrighten Z-Wave Smart Dimmer" (the same one that I switched to after using the "device" driver to clear the state data on all 4 UltraPro devices).
Ok so if the driver was set to the "switch" driver that possibly would not play nice with a dimmer, those do use different commands. I could see that working for inbound messages but not sending out a compatible command when controlling from the hub. Just realized you said two of them were dimmers. But it should have worked for the switches just fine, just maybe not with the correct settings exposed.
Still have no clue how it got switched at migration but glad you got it working again.
Since you have "plus" switches you may want to switch to the built-in "Plus" version of the GE driver. IIRC there are some differences between the non-plus/plus drivers, but can't remember the details. I don't think HE would offer two versions if they didn't need to. I use Jason's drivers, but the built-in drivers are perfectly fine.
The only driver I see for the GE Enbrighten Z-Wave is the one above (dimmer and switch versions). I don't see a "Plus" version - am I missing something? In any case, I'm going to wait for things to settle down before making any more changes!