Zwave crashed last night

First time ever got my alert that zwave crashed.. it automatically rebooted.

Came up and it was total crap.. test zwave switch took 4 secs to cycle on and off.

Looking at the zwave details a whole half of the house was at 9.6k including zwave switches 15 feet from the hub.. scratched my head and started testing stuff on that side of the house..
At first i though maybe the radio in the c8 had died as it is a new device and that is when they fail.

Took a while but narrowed it down to a hsm200 that was no longer reporting temps or responding. Apparently it died but not fully and was slamming my network.

The HSM was pretty much directly under the hub one floor down in the basement so its spamming also effected things really near the hub above it on the first floor.

Nothing in the basement near it worked either, ie ring could not do test messages to other devices etc.

Took a while to narrow down of the devices not responding that it was that, Guess a sniffer would have been better.. repairs failed as well.

Unplugged the bad device and shutdown and rebooted hub and zwave rebuilt and
everything that can be came back at 100k from the 9.6K.

Good thing the house was not empty.. it would have been bad..

I have a replacement on order.. (Not going to even bother trying resetting it and pairing again after that episode... I don't trust it). It seemed to have been going bad slowly as i was getting false motion firings a few times a day in the basement for the past couple of weeks and I kept looking at the cameras thinking we had an animal or something.

I'm always amazed at how fragile the mesh is. It really doesn't take much to bring everything down. I still feel it's not ready for mission critical stuff, but you make do.

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That is the nature of wireless communication. Relatively easy to jam.

Previously I had my hubs on a laptop PC cooling pad. It was a plastic body with a metal mesh over the fans, but that didn't seem to bother my mesh much (not like when i had it setting on a metal shelf). When I bought a new pad that had three fans, I didn't realize it was a metal frame and mesh. that crashed my Zwave mesh on my new C8 in no time. Now I have my hubs mounted on 80MM PC Cooling fans. I replace the metal fan guard with acrylic one, and my mesh is fully recovered. My recommendation to any one now is keep any metal as far as possible away from your hubs.

EDIT: in case anyone wonders, this is what the effect of those cooling fans is
image

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