Z-wave repair - brand new to HE

Not quite sure what this means. We set the alarm each night when we go to bed and when we leave the house. We turn the alarm off when we wake up and when we arrive. The alarm service files the forms/fees for us each year with the city. We have glass break monitors, contact sensors, fire/smoke detectors, and have never had a false alarm. The one time my wife burned something on the stove, the smoke detector in the kitchen triggered, and we got an immediate call. The connection to the crevice is a separate cell module, no dependency on internet. If I need to, I can VPN into our network, connect to the Vista 15P panel.

We are very happy, the service is local and they have always been very responsive. This is the third house we have used them.

Oops sorry was not referring to you - :wink:

I've noticed during my foray into residential tech that a lot of client's alarm systems are not being used properly at all. Either they let their plan lapse and are not using it or just not arming them in the first place.

I had one client who had a working alarm system except video cameras get broken into and all their stuff stolen. Yes the alarm went off and police were called but it made no difference the criminals knew how long the response would be and timed it accordingly. The family has since added cameras and glass break sensors.

The issue is trying to convince (some) people to get into a good pattern of usage with this stuff. Easy to become lazy when in a seemingly safe/secure area/neighborhood/town.

edit: I do NOT do home security for my residential clients, don't want to shoulder the risk.

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I have know two people personally with a large security company monitoring service. Unfortunately the response time was very slow. I prefer to monitor my home myself with glass break sensors and cameras and asertain if it's a false alarm or not. I've been very happy with our new V3 wyze cams.

Are zigbee locks typically just faster than z-wave? The reason I ask is I think there's a zigbee module I can plug and play into my Kwikset deadbolt.

It does seem to respond a bit quicker but that is purely anecdotal. I have had less issues with Zigbee than Z-Wave for my Yale YRD256 - mostly with pairing and connectivity.

I still prefer Zigbee due to the ease of install/use... when the ZW Long Range devices start to appear maybe that will change.

I should mention that others in this community are happily using their Z-Wave+ locks so ymmv.

That's good info. Il give it a another week or so and see if it's worth changing to something else. Mine is labeled z-wave Plus, but is just seems slow sometimes.

Is it possible I "overwhelmed" things in having my lock being associated with too many commands? I had to have a few overlapping ones with HSM, rule machine, and simple automations since I couldn't get the lock and two zigbee iris keypads all to be in sync with each other.

There are a lot of factors at play - another device or app could be causing some mesh/resource issues. You can temporarily enable stats and see whats going on..

As @lewis.heidrick warns in the next post - make sure you turn them off when done though so you wont tie up your system.

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I have 2 Kwikset Z-Wave Plus locks in service. (I'm not sure the model number matters, since the same generation appears to all use the same card, but if it does, I have 910s.) The first thing they need is a good , no great , wait, perfect mesh. (And even then, the mysterious Z-Wave routing still comes into play.) So, if you want to stick with Z-Wave, get your mesh solid. (I didn't read every post of this thread in detail, so if yours is already solid, then great!) The other thing -and there are other threads out there that talk about this- is that the Kwikset Zigbee implementation doesn't play as well with HE as the Z-Wave does. It's just little things in the driver like double reporting, and something else that doesn't come to mind at the moment, but for me, at least, it wasn't as simple as swap the cards and done. There are, again for me, trade-offs. If you do want a Zigbee card, though, as you mention, there are cards available relatively inexpensively. Check out this thread:

Or, for the TL;DR version, hop over to Amazon and buy the cheapest one of these you can find used (search the different colors/finishes) from the Amazon Warehouse and harvest the Zigbee card from it.

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B071KLHWSP

IME, yes, you need to space out commands to avoid overwhelming either your mesh in general or the lock itself. I'm not so sure it isn't a HE software problem, as it just popped up for me one day (somewhere close to an update,) but I have multiple rules that fire with lock changes and they did get bogged down. I found that adding some delays in the rules to spread things out helped tremendously. I don't think the triggering is what hurts, it's the multiple simultaneous actions, but I didn't tinker that much. The delays fixed it, so I left it at that.

Awesome, thanks for the info. I spaced out some of the arming and disarming actions by a few seconds, and I'll try that for a few days.

For anyone who uses HSM, specifically the smoke/CO2/water leak "safety" aspect, I have a dumb question. When I disarm HSM via a keyfob, or keypad, it shows as "all monitoring disabled". I can't figure out how to always keep smoke/CO2/water leak sensors armed all the time?