Z-Wave network stops Zigbee keeps working

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Hi Guys and Girls,

I am in Australia so my Hubitat includes an external dongle (z-wave antenna).
I have 15 Z-Wave devices and 1 Zigbee.
This morning none of the Z-Wave devices were communicating with Hubitat but the Zigbee lock worked perfectly. I performed a "Z-Wave Repair" with no success. I performed a "Reboot Hub" with no success. I performed a "Shutdown Hub", left it for a couple of minutes and then remove and replugged in the power supply and the system came back to life. This is the second time in a week this has happened.
This is the second unit that has performed this way, however both units used the same dongle and wiring harness as these were not replaced when the last unit was reported faulty.

Any help diagnosing the problem would be very much appreciated.

Thanks

Tom

2

Do you have any community apps installed?
I had the same issue that zwave would drop every couple of days until I worked out which app was causing this.

3

After you started the Z-wave repair you should switch to the log and watch what’s happening. Then you can see what nodes are missing or having issues.

4

What app was it for you/how did you fix it? I have same issue in UK, every few days z-wave becomes unresponsive until I shut down and pull the power.

5

It was this app which was annoying because it fit my needs perfectly. Another person had the same issue but then it worked for everyone else.

I was lucky that it had been the only app I installed in a while so could work it this was the cause of my issue.

6

I have Echo Speaks App installed plus a few community drivers. Do you think these could be the cause?

7

Thanks, I'll do that again.

8

The only thing I can think of is that your power monitoring device is already too chatty and you're at the limit of what your Z-Wave network, and perhaps your hub, can handle. The Laundry Manager app simply subscribes to a power monitoring event and mirrors those values to a virtual device. The app and the driver don't issue any Z-Wave commands themselves. I could see app putting extra load on the hub itself, since it doubles the number of executions per device (washer/dryer), but I'm not sure how it could affect the Z-wave network directly.

There have been lots of reports of power monitoring devices bringing hubs to a crawl because they send too many messages. I would double check your device settings. Also, I would consider disabling power reports for any devices that you don't really need them. I have quite a few Z-Wave outlets and switches that have power reporting capability, but I don't really need to know that my dining room dimmer is using XX watts, so I have it disabled.

Good luck!

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9

I use a wifi plug flashed with Tasmota so can control how often it reports and played around with many intervals between 30 seconds and 5 minutes and it never made any difference.
The strang ething was it was always after a couple of days the zwave would go down.

I now use another power monitor app and it also only subscribes to a power monitoring events and have had no issues which really doesn't make any sense.

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Has anyone else had the issue where the Z-Wave goes down but the Zigbee works fine? The hub has been replaced but the Dongle (ie the Z-Wave antenna) has not.

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Don't think it would be the drivers but it may be a device misbehaving.
You might need to try disabling your devices one at a time and leaving them for a while to see if the zwave goes down.
Or probably the more annoying but better option is to disable all of the devices and add them back one at a time

12

I've had this happen with a picky lock. If something has poor communication, especially zwave locks, it will bring your hub to a crawl as well.

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Thanks at9, I would do that but the z-wave lock out only happens every 1, 2 or 3 weeks, thus removing all the devices and adding one at a time could take almost a year and the wrong device could then be blamed.

What I am struggling with is the lock out is only for z-wave devices. They do not appear to slow down their communication is completely stopped. And then the system must be shut down with power removed and restarted before communication is re-established.

Has anyone every had an issue with an external z-wave antenna?

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Hi April, it appears my system doesn't slow down it completely stops communicating with z-wave devices but continues to communicate with zigbee.

15

that's what happened with my locks. Very hard to pinpoint.

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Have you checked the event logs of your devices when the network goes down?
You may be be to see a device that is over loading the hub.

The issue more than likely isn't related to the dongle but a device. However from reading on the community it seems that the dongles do have a tendency to go offline rather than slow down which is what mine did.

Maybe also post a list of devices you have as other may have had issues with them and could help pinpoint the issue.

17

I bought a z-wave sniffer and noticed during a lock up the z-wave dongle is sending acknowledgment messages but the hub wasn't processing the incoming message

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So the issue in this instance lay between the dongle and the hub, possibly the wiring harness?

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Probably not wiring, support said I think the web socket was getting overwhelmed.
All I can deduce is to much traffic and it shuts down the connection or something.

Reducing the traffic has helped reducing the frequency of lock ups with a reboot every few days to clear the memory/buffer(?).

But really I and support have no idea

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Update, mine stopped working this morning for no apparent reason again, thought I was doing well with 3 days and no issues, might be back to nighly reboots