What do you do with a ghost node?

dman2306 · June 19, 2021, 2:51pm

I have this guy:

It appears to be screwing up my mesh (commands to other devices just randomly fail). How do I get rid of this? I've clicked "Remove" about a million times. The UI gives no feedback when I do that (that's pretty confusing) so you have to look at logs which just say:
2021-06-19 10:48:09.961 am Failed node 3E remove status: 0

And I have no idea what a status of 0 means.

Can anyone help?

As a suggestion, why make this so confusing? Why not give me an English description of 0? And why not make it display in the UI? For HE to be mainstream, you shouldn't have to know details of the underlying ZWave protocol to troubleshoot. Why not display right in the UI "Failed to remove device 3E, Reason: Whatever the heck 0 means"

dman2306 · June 19, 2021, 3:08pm

Well I found this post, Unable to remove z-wave device on C-7 - #18 by bcopeland but this adds a bit more confusion to me. Now I'm getting an error of 2, not 0.

So I'm not sure what I'm supposed to do with this information.

thebearmay · June 19, 2021, 4:15pm

I believe the 2 says that the node responded so the controller is blocking the removal. Do you have an idea on what the node is, and can you remove its power?

dman2306 · June 19, 2021, 4:16pm

I do know what the device is, when I turn off that breaker I just get errors saying "no reply" when I try to remove it. Edit: Well I suspect I know what the device is. I now excluded the device 5 times, and even re-included it. That detected it as a different device. Ghost remains.

thebearmay · June 19, 2021, 4:17pm

Do you have a Z-Stick? Last time I had a node like that, I had to remove the power and then use the stick to mark it failed, which then allowed me to remove the node using the stick.

dman2306 · June 19, 2021, 4:19pm

I do but I haven't used it before, any chance you can walk me through it?

thebearmay · June 19, 2021, 4:25pm

When it works it’s simple. I started up the PC Controller software, used it to include my z-stick (put the hub into zwave pairing mode, and use the PC Controller software to put the stick into Classic Learn Mode). Once it was paired I turned off the power to my ghost, and then in PC Controller clicked on the Ghost node and clicked Check (or mark) Failed, when it came back (I believe the node may have turned red) I clicked the Remove Failed and it removed it.

scunny · June 19, 2021, 4:27pm

I'm in the same boat with a ghost device caused when pairing a new GE z-wave plus wall switch.

Can someone suggest the best stick and software to use to remove this?

dman2306 · June 19, 2021, 4:29pm

Sorry, I misunderstood. I have a z-mote, not a z-stick. I don't have PC software for this. Sigh this is so frustrating. It shouldn't be this hard, I've spent 3 days on this so far.

dman2306 · June 19, 2021, 4:31pm

I've excluded and re-included all possible devices it could have been. I know it's a small list because it's an S2 connected device and I only have a few of those. Now I get "2021-06-19 12:29:52.265 pm Failed node 3E remove status: 0" which means the controller thinks the node is fine and thus I'm just SOL?

thebearmay · June 19, 2021, 4:36pm

Without a stick I’ve had some success but it took more patience than I normally have available. What I did was:

Removed power from the ghost
Hit the refresh multiple times until the ghost “failed”, and the remove option displayed
hit the remove button

dman2306 · June 19, 2021, 4:37pm

Will it actually say failed? Mine just says PENDING

thebearmay · June 19, 2021, 4:40pm

Pending is the condition that drove me to get a stick. Could never get it to fail and remove - just stayed at pending no matter what I did.

scunny · June 19, 2021, 4:44pm

Pending is the state mine is in also.

thebearmay · June 19, 2021, 5:00pm

Here’s good guide that one of the community put together:

dman2306 · June 19, 2021, 5:52pm

I'm getting really close to giving up. I have spent an entire week migrating to a C7 after spending months trying to get the migration service to work to no avail. Now I'm at a point where my whole mesh barely works. I send commands, nothing happens. I'm at the point of wondering if it's time to give up here.

I now have nodes (literally inches away from my hub) saying unreachable.

@bobbyD @bcopeland do either of you have suggestions? I've been a big supporter of Hubitat but I'm close to throwing in the towel. During this migration I had my db corrupted, my mesh stop working, ghost devices appear, etc. I've been working on this since last Sunday, a full week and I'm still at a point where barely anything is working! I'm sitting here sending commands to my devices via the UI and watching them completely fail, nothing is processing the commands, device statuses out of sync with reality. This is SO frustrating. What can I do here? Or am I just out of luck?

672southmain · June 19, 2021, 7:26pm

Use the USB Z-Wave stick and SiLabs PC Controller, part of the free SimplicityStudio software, with the guide compiled by @erktrek and @danabw. I know you can do it. It’s part of the C-7 initiation.

dman2306 · June 19, 2021, 9:47pm

Nah, I think I'm at the point of throwing good money after bad. If you actually have to go out and buy a z-stick as a "right of initiation" to get your C7 to work, that's a bad product. Literally NOTHING is working on my hubitat now. I can't get a single device to respond. Every device I try to Repair says it is unreachable. This is just ridiculous at this point.

When I try to control a device I just get logs like:
021-06-19 17:43:28.776 seqNo: 224, routeChanged: false, transmissionTime: 6ms, repeaters: None, speed: Unknown, rssi: [0 dBm, 0 dBm, 0 dBm, 0 dBm, 0 dBm], Ack channel: 0, Transmit channel: 0

For every device, ones that have worked fine for years. Unless @bcopeland has any suggestions I think I'm at the point where I have to call it quits.

I'm sorry, I try to be nice and I like the community and team here, but the above is just plain unacceptable. 100% of my nodes are unreachable. How is that even possible?

In the last week I've experienced a corrupt db that caused me to lose hours of work, and now I've lost my entire zwave mesh. The C7 has been a horrible experience for me and I think I'm ready to try out Home Assistant.

I had this same problem when I tried using the hub migration tool. I was told it was because my mesh was already bad on my C5. So that's why I invested the last week to move every single device manually. My reward? The exact same problem, nothing works and I got to waste 60 hours over the last week doing it.

Yup, that's literally every single zwave device I have. Failed, unreachable, broken.

Any device I click refresh on says NOT_RESPONDING or PENDING. This isn't my mesh, this isn't the devices, something is not working with Hubitat.

hydro311 · June 19, 2021, 10:39pm

I got nothin' helpful to add other than I'm hopeful your voice may finally be the one that lights a fire under this mess.

You are a huge contributor to this community, and it would a major bummer to lose you.

As I understand it, this issue is ultimately on SiLabs to fix, but since Hubitat is the only (AFAIK) 700 hub out there, Hubitat should have A LOT of sway with SiLabs if they ever hope to mainstream 700 z-wave... As it stands now, 700 z-wave is STILL no where near ready for prime time and that's just plain sad - it's been "out' for way too long to still be in this overall state.

I've been very fortunate that I've been able to purge my couple of ghosts without a stick, but as a Mac user, paralleling Windows just for the dumb stick is absurd. No way I'm doing that.

Is SiLabs really this arrogant and unresponsive to the Hubitat team's feedback?!? Why on earth is this still an issue with 700 z-wave? It's completely ridiculous.

tmcdonald · June 19, 2021, 11:32pm

Not to fan the fire but I have a ghost node on a C-7 .140 that I cannot get ride of even with my z-sticks. I have removed a few in the past with the stick that the hub would not remove but the z-stick is not a guaranteed answer.