I have had a recurring issue with my Zwave radio failing fairly consistently over the past 12 months. (Running 2.4.3.131 on C-7 hub). It does not happen at a consistent rate but roughly once every 7-10 days all of the Zwave devices become unresponsive. When checking the Zwave status page none of the devices appears there. Each time I can restore them powering the hub down, disconnecting it from power for 30 seconds and restarting everything. It will work fine for a bit (anywhere from 48 hours to 3 weeks in my experience) but then things go bad again.
I’ve read every Hubitat community post I can find on this topic and have tried everything I can think of so now am looking for some advice.
I have a few potential factors which might be at play:
I have 3 very old GE/Jasco dimmers that are not Zwave+. They work fine but require me to use polling so perhaps that is causing some strain? (Note: I only have 17 total Zwave devices and only these 3 require this so it does not appear to be a massive load on the hub.)
I do have one ghost node from an old outlet that I cannot seem to rid myself of. I do not have access to a pc so cannot use any of the more advanced Zwave tools. I’ve tried every other suggestion I can find with no luck.
Any ideas on the best way forward? I have thought of the following options but since they each require investment of time or money wanted to pressure test to see if these might work.
Replace older dimmers with a Zwave+ version to eliminate polling.
Wipe out the Zwave table and start over so I can eliminate the ghost. It would be a pain but is doable as long as my devices reconnect ok to the new table.
Migrate from my C7 to a C8? Presumably, I would only do this if there was some reason to think my Zwave radio in the current hub is bad.
Any other thoughts? My Zwave devices were rock solid up until a year ago. Now I am wishing I had all zigbee and thread devices…
It seems there are 1,000 ways to attack ZW issues and I think I have tried them all over 10 years. I think there are that many threads trying to help people as well;
One thing if you've tried everything, except the ZW stick/PC/SIlabs which I had to do once, is maybe a full hub wipe including radios.
Hopefully the serious ZW guys chime in as this may not help but if you sign up for the Cloud backup that allows you to backup both radios.
You can then wipe your hub and restore to a fresh device including the radios.
It may be possible the Cloud backup will back up the problem as well so this might not be helpful.
I had to play around with this scenario as the C8 Pro I bought earlier this year had a ZW radio that went bad and all my radio info got wiped.
It took many tries but I managed to restore the radio to a replacement hub via Cloud backup and everything worked again.
There is a very good chance it is a single device on your mesh that is causing all the problems. The two times now I have had zwave issue like this it was tracked down to a problem device.
Power cycling the device may fix it for a bit, if you track down the device causing it, but if it comes back again you may need to replace the device. In both of my cases it was a Zwave dimmer causing the issues.
The trick is tracking down which device is causing the problem. Instead of booting the hub, try resetting one device at a time to see which one might bring back the Zwave network. Usually you can just air-gap them, but you may need to hit the breaker for devices that cannot be air gapped.
It could also be a hub issue, or ghosts, or other issues, but every seven days matches my experience with a bad device. I would start there.
Interesting. So if I reboot or airgap the device while the network fails (and it is the problem device) will the Zwave network automatically restart? If not, how do I get the network to boot up again without a hub restart?
Comforting to hear that others have experienced similar issues and found ways around it. I will definitely try some of these tips before I wipe the whole Zwave network and start from scratch (although I won’t be surprised if I end up there)
My first major Zwave issue was caused by two Eva Logix dimmers I bought and installed together on two circuits. They started by individually dropping off the network every week or two, and I would air gap them and they would work again, and the mesh never went down.
After a few months of this, one day the mesh died. My immediate thoughts did not go to those two dimmers. I could get the mesh back at first by changing to the non-zwave LR option in the Zwave settings, which actually just puts you back on LR after, but somehow it was fixing the mesh. Then it got to the point where nothing I tried would fix the mesh. I got a replacement C8 using my Hub Protect subscription, as I was sure it was the hub at that point.
I restored a cloud backup to the new hub and the problem followed me. That's when it dawned on me it must be those two dimmers. I replaced them both with new ones from a different manufacturer, and all was good after that. Now I have a spare C8, which is not a bad thing.
I did not do any additional backup restores after replacing the dimmers, things just started working. So you may waste you time wiping the whole network, my problem was never in my hub, my current setup or in the backups.
If the problem device is restarted the zwave may slowly come back if the radio is not totally jammed by this point. If nothing responds it is probably jammed. Best bet is to SHUT DOWN the hub and unplug it for ~30 seconds then plug back in to fully restart the zwave radio.
Ok, with everyone’s advice, I decided to begin excluding a device at a time to see if I can improve the experience. I started with the device I suspected as the culprit and - amazingly - when I got rid of it and restarted the hub I was finally able to rid myself of the ghost node. (It appears that the ghost node was phantom connected to the excluded device.). I’ve re-added the device and we will see if that fixes everything.
If not, I will target an EVA Logik device next. It was always sketchy and the comments above have me wondering if it is an issue. Holding off on the complete Z-Wave rebuild for now.
Thanks and I will let you know how it goes in case it is useful for another in the future.
I am now a week+ after replacing the old GE/Jasco dimmers with Zooz Zen74s. Much better performance and I have not had any Z-Wave issues since. So I suspect it was just an old, bad device. Probably too early to call it completely solved but it looks like that is where it will end up. Thanks for the advice.
