ZWave Issues with Warranty Hub

It might be the power supply from the C7, but since the C8 one is not in the box, I may have used the new one. Either way, it is one that came with a hub.

Ok as long as it is a regular C8 (not pro) then the C7 and C8 had basically the same supply.

That being said, it might be worth swapping out for a known working 1a or higher good quality supply. If you have any old OE phone blocks those usually work good, my hub runs off an old iPhone 1A block. Would be good to see if its the same/better/worse to rule out the power supply as the issue.

When you power down and restart, and z-wave is not working does it say it is offline on the z-wave details or you just test it and its not working (or how do you know its not working)?

Have you checked the Logs > Hub / Location Details tabs for any errors about z-wave crashing?

Have you done a Reboot > Advanced, Rebuild DB and Purge Logs? Would be worth trying.

When Zwave does not work on power on, everything looks normal and it says enabled. Simply not working.

No logs showing anything about ZWave. I click a Zwave icon on a dashboard and I get the gray hourglass and nothing happens. The icon stays like that.

When this first started happening, I could at some times move the dimmer control and it would respond. Other times I could physically change the switch at the wall, and it would register the change on the dashboard, and usually start working.

This week that doesn't work either, once dead it does not come back until I flip region to non-LR. If I try changing region to the current one (LR) it does not fix the issue, and it does a quick spin. I have to actually choose the non-LR region for the older hubs, and then it spins for a longer time and Zwave comes back most times after that.

I can try a different power supply. This is the power supply that I was using with the first C8 hub, when ZWave worked great but I had Zigbee issues. With the replacement hub, same power supply, Zigbee is great and ZWave has the issues.

ZWave died dead again 5 minutes after the last post.

I shutdown and changed power supplies to another known-good 1A. Surprisingly, ZWave is working when it came up. I will monitor and see if it stays working.

Nope. Even with the new power supply, ZWave died after 5 minutes. Everything I have done today seems to have made the issue worse. Before today I was getting at least 24 hours before the fail, now it is just useless and I cannot use the hub.

Based on all the info and I see you have GE/Jasco devices. My next guess would be one of those Jasoc switches is dying and spamming the mesh until it chokes. This has happened to others in the past. Not sure how they figured out which one was doing it.

You could try air-gapping a bunch of them and see if that makes a difference. Then if that helps slowly add them back one at a time.

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Ok, I'm guessing if that is the case, is it is Living Room Ceiling or Kitchen Ceiling. I have had those disconnect in the past on all hubs back to C7, though not very often. I air gapped them when they disconnected and they come back when power is restored without me doing anything else. Those are the only ones I have ever seen disconnect. I figured they were flakey, but didn't think they could result in ZWave failure. If so, they never caused ZWave to stop on the C7 or the first C8.

I can try air-gapping those and see if ZWave stays up. I should mention that after last post, I did the region update and got ZWave back, it it has stayed now since.

I will wait for another fail, then get ZWave working again, and then air gap those and then see if I lose ZWave again.

Another fail. I air-gapped those two switches and got Zwave working with region update. I will see how long it lasts.

This is not relevant. Any of those devices could have started spamming at any time if they are in a downward spiral to death. It has happened to multiple people in the past, some never figured out which device it was until it totally died and they replaced it.

One other thing you could try is, with the hub powered off, swap the antennas and make sure both are tight. This would rule out a bad antenna.

Another Failure. Honesty, wouldn't I see "spamming" devices in the logs? Why would the issue only appear within days of getting the replacement hub, and get progressively worse?

I think we are going down a rabbit hole. I NEVER had this Zwave issue with the C7 or first C8, all the same ZWave devices connected. Only thing that changed is the HUB. If Hubitat doesn't want to stand by their products and give me another hub at this point, what is the use of using Hubitat? Far too coincidental that the issue started exactly with the replacement hub. I went down this path with my Zigbee issues for 5 months, I am not happy to be here again. After it all, it was the hub that caused the Zigbee issues after everyone kept telling me it was not, try this, try that, wasting my time until I am ready to dump Hubitat all together, I have wasted so much of my time this year trying to blame Hubitat hardware fails on other "issues" when it was not, and my house has not worked correctly since early January.

I'm done troubleshooting this. THE HUB IS BAD.

Edit: I spend so much time on Reddit convincing people this is the Hub to get. When it works it is great, and I have been very happy on Hubitat, but this is just starting to be the end-all for me. I can't in good conscience recommend a hub that has constant radio hardware failures and has made my life a pain for seven months now due to not functioning as it should. I should probably go back to my C7 and let the world know that the C8 Hub is an undependable failure.

We can always try another hub. But historically, if you have misbehaving devices in your mesh, and carry them on a new hub, it is likely that you'll end up in the same situation. Replacement hub will be on its way to you, shortly.

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I don't work for Hubitat and no one ever said they would not send you a new hub, and in fact, they are sending you a new one... You opened a warranty case 6 hours ago per the post above.

I don't know what the failure rate is exactly, but I suspect it is less than 1%. If you did get two hubs with different hardware issues that would be a rare feat.

No, not if they are just spamming out malformed or garbage transmissions due to a hardware malfunction. It would just saturate the mesh until nothing functions.

Correlation does not always = causation

This is actually exactly what would happen in the possible scenario I brought up, it would keep getting worse until the malfunctioning device totally dies.

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I do not know how the warranty claim works, apparently. I assumed there would be a time period where it needed to be determined if a new hub will even be sent. If there is one on the way, great!

I know co-incidence is not causality, which is why I lived with the Zigbee issues on the first hub for months on end. Everyone said that they were still working out Zigbee issues on the C8, my Sengled bulbs were the issue... etc.

I did just change the antennas. Is one for Zigbee and one for ZWave? The warranty hub did not come with antennas, so it now makes me wonder if one antenna is bad, and when I got the new hub I simply switched the issue over to ZWave. I will know shortly if I now have Zigbee issues, Zwave is currently working.

Yes one connection on the back is Zigbee and one is Z-wave. Both supplied Antenna are identical and support both frequencies. There have been some cases of defective antennas and typically swapping them will identify that because the issues swap to the other protocol.

No Zigbee errors and Zwave is down again. Not antennas.

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I've had ~10 GE/Jasco 14xxx model devices fail in the spamming of death failure mode... On mine, yes I did see it in the logs typically as on or off commands repeating every 50-100ms or so. In those cases the switch/dimmer stopped working locally as well.

I ripped out every 14xxx model GE/Jasco I had and threw them in the trash.

That's not to say that one would "always" see it in the logs when it fails in spam mode, just that I did on all of my failures.

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I thought that GE/Jasco would replace those old switches with new ones?

By the way, I've also had issues with the GE/Jasco switches (even the zigbee ones...)

Sometimes they will sometimes they won't.

After the rash of failures I've seen, honestly I didn't want them to replace them. Would rather move on to something that doesn't have such a colossal failure mechanism.

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Same here. Every single one died quite suddenly, and all within a few months of each other. They were destined to fail or designed to fail, not sure which.

I think they had to be within a certain age (5 years?).

:+1:

When ZWave is working, all the Jasco switches are working both by Zwave and by the switch.

I'm seeing no spamming in the logs either way. These switches are about a year old, and I do not think they are the source of my issues as I had them 6 months with the C7, then several months on the original C8 with no Zwave issues. Only had Zwave issues after moving to the warranty hub.