ZWave Conflict?

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1

Looking to solve a strange, although non-critical puzzle.

Recently, in a fit of what i considered cleverness, I installed a new in wall structured wiring box of diminutive size, in a dead space in the wall at the top of my basement stairwell.

The box is about 9 x 16 by abot 3.5" deep, and is WiFi transparent.

With a little planning, i squeezed a Ubiquiti Flex switch for PoE & network, and one of my new C8 hubs with a nice PoE adapter.

The C8 performs brillianly in this location, with a single hop to all Zwave devices in my house, as its roughly centered in all directions in the house, and has minimal obstructions interms of ducting or major appliances.

So far so good.

Eying the space, I realized I could use the free space to install a C7 to use for apps, all radios off, and retire my C5.

Installed perfectly.

Once turned on however, Zwave hell began.

My Zwave network basically crashed. All but a couple of nodes went incommunicado.

Checked the C7, the radios are off. Hub mesh was still enabled, i deleted all the devices and turned off the mesh. Reverified radio was off. Rebooted numerous times, reset everything I could think of. No joy.

Eventually disconnected the C7 hub, and everything started recovering.

I've reproduced this several times, but i can't explain it.

Does the Zwave radio "disabled" power down the radio? I expect it to, but perhaps not? The 2 hubs are mere inches from one another, but with one radio off, that shouldnt matter, right?

I don't know if this was the previous C7 that controlled these devices or not. I didn't record which was which when I swapped them out. But again, that shouldnt matter...

Now that I think about it, its clear I didn't do a factory reset, but with the radios off, why would that matter?

Ideas?

S.

2

Try resetting the Zwave radio, and then disable it.

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3

Yeah, that was one of the steps. I may try again though. Good suggestion.

Now is a good time to try for sure. I've got the C8 off for the moment.

S.

Did a zwave reset, and a soft reset of the hub. We'll see what happens. :slight_smile:

4

Can't say what is going on, but I can say it should work, I have a C7 rules only hub, radios turned off, sitting right next to my C8 with no issues.

My C7 never had the radios turned or any devices connected to it as it was used for this purpose since day one.

5

Yeah, it seems like it should work, but every time I turn that hub on, my Zwave network goes to ...fill in expletive of choice here...

Really odd.

S.

6

Is there any way to move it to another part of the house farther from the C8?

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Sure. I can turn it off too. My C5 is handling automation just fine. I'd really like to understand the problem though. Wait. Hang on a sec. Good idea. I hadnt thought of testing that - that is, perhaps it has nothing to do with proximity.

Thanks. Let me try that.

S

8

Thats really odd. My C8 is wall mounted right nest to the C7 that I had everything on. Once it was all done I powered up the C7 while the C8 was still on line and reset the radios and Changed the Zigbee Channel, then disabled them. After that was all done I rebooted the C7. It's all been fine since.

I did have a small issue with my mesh crashing, but that was due to my hub being mounted on a laptop cooling pad that had a metal mesh as well as a metal frame. Once I took it off that cooling pad and mounted to a PC Cooling fan with the metal grates removed, everything recovered beautifully.

9

Right at the moment, my mesh is destroyed. Nothing is really talking, those things that are talking are multi-hopping, and hit stupendous speeds of 40kbps or so.

When i first put the hub in this location, everything was 100kbps no hops, everything direct to hub. Now, its a mess.

Im thinking of stepping back to my original config, by removing the Unifi Flex and basically leaving only the hub and its POE splitter in there, and leaving the hub off for 30 mins to see if the mesh will rebuild when I power it back up.

Zwave repair just messes the mesh up as far as I can tell.

For now, I've relocated the C7 to the drawer of naughty devices, and repositioned the Flex and C8 to prevent any obstruction of the antennas.

The C8 is powered down for a little while. Hopefully when i turn it back on the gremlins will be banished, and we return to some semblence of Mesh normality. Fingers crossed!

S.

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Well, turning the hub off, waiting for 30 mins or so, and then powering it back up, seems to have recoverd the mesh. After ~ 10 hours, everything is talking.

Some of the routes are odd, and there are still a few 40kbps routes, but the mesh seems to be recovering.

Ill try @Slate suggestion - when everything has settled down. It still doesn't make sense to me, the suggestion @thebearmay made should have worked, if in fact I had failed to do the reset before i took the C7 down during the swapover. Still puzzled, but mostly recovered. Lol

S.

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11

Someone that owns a Zniffer should be able to answer this question definitively, but since the advice when trying to reset Z-Wave's radio is to shut down the hub and remove power before restarting, this would imply that 'disabling' the radio doesn't turn it off.

I have a Zigbee sniffer and verify that the 'enable/disable' function attributed to the Zigbee radio does not turn it off. That switch has no effect at all on the physical Zigbee radios emissions (and doesn't even affect low levels of the Zigbee stack which keep transmitting and receiving). It does affect the Zigbee application layer, however.

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I have one actually. But, the software runs on a windows laptop, the which has not been turned on in over a year, so the idea of turning on fills me with dread. I already know the 15 million updates, mandatory changes, etc, all before i can even get to the software...are going to piss me off, so....never mind, I don't have a Zniffer. Lol

Would be interesting to see if it was only an application layer shutoff though.

S.

13

This made me curious after converting my network to almost exclusively Z-Wave devices. I had my "cloud app" C-5 (all radios off) sitting next to my C-7. After moving all my cloud apps to my c-7 and removing my C-5 from the equation my Z-Wave mesh seems to be significantly snappier.

I think @Tony is correct that at some level Z-Wave radio is always broadcasting which means if you have two HE hubs in close proximity there can be degradation. At least with ZigBee we have my multiple channels to avoid this, Z-Wave not so.

@scottgu3 thanks for drawing my attention to this.

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14

So.

As @Slate, @Tony & @halfrican.ak all indicated, its pretty clear that 3" of distance between a C7 (radios "off") and a C8 was the source of my ZWave woes.

Turning off the C7 allowed the mesh to recover, and after 48 hours or so, my mesh is once again, snappy and stable, with 100% direct connections, all at 100kbps.

To confirm, i once again turned the C7 on, however this time its probably 18ft as the direct wave travels between the two devices. No mesh disruption whatsoever after at least an hour.

I will monitor it, but so far so good.

S.

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15

Bizarre...I have my C8 and C7 about six feet apart in the same room, both w/Z-Wave radios enabled and devices connected. Don't have any Z-Wave issues. When I first got my second C7 I had two C7's less than a foot away from one another, Z-Wave radios (and Zigbee) enabled, and I never had any issues.

You did say that the C7 has to be plugged in and next to the C8 for the problems to occur, right? Just having the C7 unplugged inside the wiring box doesn't do anything, right?

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Correct on both points.

I suspect a foot or two would be sufficient, but 3" or so was a no go.

S

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My wife won't even let me sit that close to her. :wink:

Hmm...I wonder, could it be that the C7 also farts? :smiley: :smiley:

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Here's a picture of how great it looked while failing miserably :slight_smile:

Google Photos

S.

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Man...gotta admit, that is damn pretty, really nice. Bummer that you couldn't leave them together. Nice work by you, regardless. You can come over and re-organize the in-wall wiring boxes in my house any time. :slight_smile:

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Just noticed...unless the picture is rotated incorrectly, your antennas are pointing left-right instead of up-down. Working OK in that orientation, or just a pic issue?
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