They really aren’t that bad. The Z-Wave network seems to be searching a bit on those slow devices that are paired S0, trying to find better routes, but you’ve only got one device at 9.6kbps.
Because they are controlling external access, you do want them to have secure pairing.
How can I troubleshoot when things don't happen as expected. For example, I just triggered my "Lights Off" scene and nothing happened. Right now it's super unreliable. An hour or two later, it might be OK. It's just so inconsistent.
I triggered "Lights Off" and none of my lights turned off however Hubitat seems to think that they are off... but they are definitely on.
If I look at the status of the device, it shows OFF even though it's ON. If I hit refresh, it changes to ON, it's true state.
What's going on here?
BTW - I'm having this problem with two Honeywell Z-Wave plus plug-in modules.
it almost seems like my problem is that hubitat doesn't know the true state of the devices when they change. I made another post about my garage door opener that was pretty much the same problem - hubitat didn't know the garage door state had changed so there was no reason to act on it.
Tonight one of my door locks wouldn't lock as part of my "Sleep" scene. I ran the scene several times but it wouldn't lock it. There are two door locks in the rule, one 15 feet from the hub and the other is in a detached garage about 30 feet away.
I was able to instantly lock the house lock via the device page. I'm also able to lock/unlock the detached garage lock just fine from the device page.
So I created a new rule with just an action to lock both the locks. Wouldn't go. So I removed the detached garage lock from the rule and it ran instantly.
So both locks seem to be working fine as far as ZWave goes but when I put them BOTH into a rule, the inside door lock stops working.
any thoughts on that?
What type of locks, and do you have any repeaters in the mesh?
Do you have z-wave locks in all your scenes? Because if so, that would explain a big part of this.
Because they use beaming (to preserve battery life) and because they have S0 security (which is talkative), z-wave locks really do a number on a z-wave mesh. A single lock event can cause delays for other devices like lights. But if you have more than one lock trying to do something at the same time? Paralysis for the mesh.
I wrote an app specifically for this, because I have 5 smart locks. It locks them one at a time, with small delays in between, and has retries if a lock doesn't respond. It is triggered by turning on a virtual switch, so you would put that virtual switch into your scene, instead of putting the locks themselves in there.
Now, an even better solution is to switch to zigbee locks. But that's not always an option, for cost reasons and other reasons. But it's true that my zigbee locks are far, far less hassle than my z-wave+ locks.
Interesting, thank you... yeah I have two door locks and two garage door openers. They are GoControl and Schlage BE469.
I don’t have the locks or openers in scenes (not possible since scenes don’t let you select door stuff) but they are in rules that contain other zwave devices.
Thanks for the app - I’ll start experimenting with shuffling things around with this new info in mind and give the app a try.
The thing that bums me out is that all this worked ok on SmartThings. That tells me that HE is the problem. And like I say, both of these locks work fine individually at the device level. It’s when I put them together in a rule that it seems to go south. That smells like bug to me.
I sent a note to support I’m hoping they will work with me to find root cause.
this could easily be a mesh problem and cannot compare to smartthigns as your mesh will be different once you rebuild it..
also a buggy device or lock will work from the panel as it has time to do retries etc to get the command through. however, with other devices at the same time it can still cause failures while it is trying to retry the command or do route changes to get the command through.
They are Schlage BE469 locks and GoControl door openers.
I don’t have any repeaters. Aren’t all my newer ZWave dimmers acting as repeaters?
Or are there standalone repeaters that would be even better than a dimmer as a repeater?
Hopefully Lockdown will help you. I found that my z-wave locks worked fine individually also, but failed when doing them together. (Such as in a rule.) They're so chatty, they saturate the z-wave network.
I can't find the thread, but someone had talked to an engineer behind the scenes at SmartThings. SmartThing's solution to making this work apparently involves resetting their z-wave radio in the middle of operating the locks. The user doesn't know this is happening. But an unfortunate side effect is that lights stop working randomly when you lock a door. I actually experienced this when I had SmartThings.
That's not a solution the Hubitat team will do. Break one thing to fix another. So I ended up writing Lockdown in order to spread out the lock commands.
But I also switched out the z-wave chips in several of my locks to convert them to zigbee. The way that locks work on z-wave is just a flaky protocol, in my opinion. You have to work around it too much.
I have kwikset locks, and you can change out the chip to switch to zigbee. I don't know if you can do the same thing in Schlage locks.
Very interesting info, thank you. Yeah I guess each platform has different ways of solving the same problems. Sounds like SmartThings took the approach of just solving it for the user with some duct tape while Hubitat takes the approach of not using workarounds in code/procedure but leaving the user to figure it out for themselves.
All this has me reconsidering zwave. Funny how things STILL aren’t ANY better than the X10 days. I mean, really, amount of time wasted troubleshooting is the same then and now. Sigh. 
i also converted my kwikset zwave locks to zigbee in both houses. much more reliable.. the zwave requires only specific devices that can do beaming reapeating.. most cannot and then therefore cause issues.. you could try putting a aeon ver 7 repeater or ring right next to each lock.. but probably just as cheap to lock on ebay or amazon and get a used zigbee lock just to pull the card out and convert your kwikset like i did.. for the schlage you are on your own.
i know have 8 kwiket locks between the two houses running zigbee with absolutely no issues. other than one door where the tolerances are off and it occasionally sticks..
Put a repeater as close to the lock(S) as possible. Repair all the rest of that stuff without security (Except locks, they should pair at s2) While you're dimmer should be acting as repeaters, personally I like to have 1 or 2 open ones (ones not in a box).
Honestly, I've found z-wave great for everything except locks. I'm running 3 Hubitat hubs in 2 different houses, and I've only found 2 nasty issues:
But with those 2 issues fixed, my meshes are solid and devices are reliable. The key to remember is this. When you think that "my z-wave is being flaky", what that really probably means is, "I have a flaky device. I need to find the device that is causing this problem."
thanks, all - this gives me some good leads, ideas and things to try. Fortunately, locking the doors is not a time sensitive thing unlike garage doors. If the doors need to lock 5-10 minutes after everything else happens, that's fine.
I'm still confused about repeaters though. What's the difference between something like a Ring or Aeotec repeater and a ZWave+ dimmer? I have ZWave light switches adjacent to the door lock 1 foot away. Then hub is only 20 feet away from the door. That's what gets me is how close all this stuff is and it still doesn't work.
Guess I'll give this a try and see how it goes over the next few days. Feels so wrong. Maybe Wi-Fi is the answer for the industry. These kinds of issues won't fly with 99.99999% of the population.
So, I've spent all night rebuilding my Z-Wave network. I excluded every device in the house, factory reset them all, then added them back going closest to further away. I added about 20 devices in a 1200 sq. ft home.
I reduced my scenes down to just the necessary lights to test reliability. It was much better than it was before the rebuild but I was still getting 10 second delays when switching scenes.
Then I went to add my garage door opener and although it would pair/enroll, I couldn't get hubitat to open or close it or get status. unenrolled, re-enrolled, removed devices from the mesh, just zero luck getting it to talk.
So I dragged out my SmartThings hub that I thought I'd never need again and paired the garage door opener. Same exact hub-to-device distance. Boom, connection - open and close door. Worked like a charm.
Apples to apples, one of these hubs is better than the other at Z-Wave.
I have also noticed this. But I lost the link to the antenna modification. Could you post it again, please? Also, what length antenna did you use?
If you remove the locks from this and replace them with the single virtual switch from Lockdown, you won’t need any delays in the rule.
Download the Hubitat app
