Zwave network crashing every few hours

🛎️ Get Help
1

Hi,

I have a C8 hub that's been working flawlessly for the past few months.

As of a few days ago, all zwave devices stop working abruptly and I have to reboot the hub to get them to work again.

This issue repeats less that 24h later, and again, and again...

I thought there was a device that failed as it was misbehaving, so I unplugged it (a Fibaro implant) but this keeps happening.

The zwave logs don't show anything wrong. There are messages about new routes for no device printed every 2 minutes or so when this happens.

Please help.

2

I wonder if you've tried: controlled shutdown/pull power to hub/wait 30 seconds/plug power back in to hub ? That does a better job than a mere reboot.

Along with the misbehaving Fibaro, do you have any old Jasco switches. :slight_smile:

2 Likes
3

I wonder if you've tried: controlled shutdown/pull power to hub/wait 30 seconds/plug power back in to hub ?

I have not, I'll try that later.

Also, the latest device I added is a Zen16 multi relay that was giving me problems when I used ST. I wonder, if that's the culprit... No old Jasco devices though.

Is there any tool that snoops on the zwave traffic, so I can see every message that the hub sees? I wonder if there's a device failing and flooding the network with bogus traffic that overwhelms the zwave radio on the hub.

In the meantime, I'm replacing everything zwave device I can with zigbee. zwave has been nothing but a pain, my ST zwave mesh failed so spectacularly that made me move to Hubitat...

4

Go to your Z-Wave Details page under Settings. Could be you may have created a Z-Wave Ghost or two when trying to add the Zen16 (or another of your Z-Wave devices). If you post a screen shots of your Z-Wave Details page we can help you ID any issues (including ghosts) that are there.

See this topic for more info on Z-Wave ghosts...

1 Like
5

What hub platform / firmware?

We need to a see a screenshot of this message please.

Unlikely, many of use that device and it works great. You may want to check out this custom driver to get the most out of it: [DRIVER] Zooz Relays Advanced (ZEN16, ZEN17, ZEN51, ZEN52)

1 Like
6

Oh wow, this is super detailed. I do have a few ghost nodes I tried to remove without success. I'll try the approach to power down the hub first, see if that works.

1 Like
7

What hub platform / firmware?

C8 Pro , firmware 2.4.0.151

We need to a see a screenshot of this message please.

Yeah, it's super intermitent so hard to catch. I'll try next time it happens.

Unlikely, many of use that device and it works great.

That's what I believe too.

8

Just an update on how I finally solved it: I believe this issue was due to a bunch of ghost devices in the zwave network that I could not eliminate by any means.

In the end, I reset the zwave network, which clears all zwave nodes but leaves the devices. Then, I added each device one by one carefully, replacing the original device. Finally, I can just delete the "(old)" devices without any issue.

I could see that some devices sometimes fail to add. When that happens, I have to restart the hub before I can try to add another zwave device. After the hub restarts, there's always a ghost device that I remove by unpowering the failed device, then "refresh" and "delete" the ghost (the deletion now always works), then trying again to add the device.

The big offenders were the Fibaro Smart Implants, some I had to try 2x to add successfully, and the Powerley Thermostats. After trying many times, I was not able to add the Powerley thermostats back without creating ghosts. I'm not using them at this point, I replaced them with a Honeywell T6 and a (zigbee) Zen thermostat.

I hope my note about how I fixed this problem helps people in the future who stumble upon this post with similar issues.

4 Likes