I've been working on my Vera Plus transition and have been adding Z-wave devices, only 2 to go now out of 67 and am now experiencing occasional complete shutdowns of the Z-wave network, i.e., nothing replies to any command and I try a refresh of any device the result is Pending and if I try a Z-wave repair, no device responds to Ping and all will be unreachable, every single one of them.
I have several rules that have a precondition with a date range (True when Autumn, for example) and trigger with a time of day event (say 14:00) to turn on a the water heater then wait "Wait for event: When time is 17:00" and turn the heater off.
Is it possible that RM makes the HE get stuck into that wait and somehow break the connection or should I be looking at some other reason? If so, what can it possibly be?
Rebooting the HE has not worked every time to unstick it, only shutting it down in the UI and pulling the plug will do it.
If you have installed a bunch of Z-wave devices the first guess would be you have Ghost nodes. Lots of discussions about them on the forum, A quick search should find plenty of info for you. Perhaps post a screen shot of your Z-wave details page.
I doubt it. But go to the Logs tab, and look at app statistics. I open the double arrow on that page, and enable all stats to get a better idea of things.
Yes.
There are many things that can bomb out a Zwave network. Ghosts, power reporting set too often, too many devices paired with S0 security, and more.
Please post a screenshot of your Zwave details page so we can take a look for obvious issues.
This looks fine to me, few route changes most of the devices have one jump at most, most have many neighbours. I've had a few devices ghosting on me while including them but I managed to get rid of all of them and have none. What do you guys think?
It’s possible you have rules that are turning too many things on/off at the same time, causing the Z-Wave radio to get clogged and the mesh to get busy. See if you can do some metering to space things out.
Rule of thumb, what would the limit be on how many devices should I send commands to at the same time? Switching to night mode (which I do manually) does trigger a rule that sends commands to most of the lights and all the shades and locks at the same time. That would be half of the mesh.
In such a situation, do you guys insert delays in between, say, each group of five devices or something similar?
One at a time in a perfect world, with maybe 100ms delay between each command.
Yes. 50ms-100ms usually, but it depends...
There is no single answer to this though. It depends how busy the mesh is, how many devices are taking multiple hops, how many are using s0 security (s0 uses 3x as much messaging as none or s2), etc, etc. You just have to play with the delay until it gets reliable and/or reduced the baseline traffic on your mesh to free up more bandwidth (slowing down energy reports, things like that).
A convenient way to add delays is to put devices in groups, and then use group metering. That may not work though if you have a lot of different types of devices you need to manipulate. It works best with similar device types.
Thx neonturbo, just installed that app and tested it. I had indeed blinds and lights not responding to the night mode switch close/off commands. With that app, all goes off and down with a 100ms interval parameter.
Your table looks ok, but you have a ton of stuff there paired as S0. This can be an extremely chatty encryption method. I would re pair anything you have as none (including s2 devices) EXCEPT for locks or garage door openers. This will immensely improve the speed of your mesh.
I would also look at your rules and heed what @672southmain says above.
