Wow, old school. Does 15 years cover the X1 days or was that already legacy by then?
Cut my teeth on it, and Homeseer v1. Still have a bunch of old X10 devices in a box in the garage.
That's awesome! My uncle was on what I assume was the bleeding edge of X10, I remember him having an X10 setup as early as 1985-1990'ish. I did start with HomeSeer as well, but that wasn't until 2013 or so it was a much later version. Respect to the old schoolers such as yourself, futzing with this stuff for a long time.
I'm might get crushed for contributing this but going to brave the storm anyway. robricc is not alone here. There are others on this forum that have contributed copious amounts of time posting about the same thing. The Z-Wave radio on this hub has had issues with many users such as myself, even recently.
Like robricc, I had been with ST for a long time. Built a new house and decided to go with the Hubitat C7 as my hub. I had a pretty stable mesh going with ST and never really seemed to have problems like you've heard from others but I coveted some of the things that Hubitat had to offer over ST. Things like true local processing and advanced device settings were very appealing, so I jumped ship.
I have about 80 devices all of which are Z-Wave with only 3 devices being Zigbee. I built my mesh using the latest how to documentation from Hubitat and a few weeks later the z-wave radio started randomly quitting. None of the devices would respond. The radio would go down for hours and nothing I did would get it going again. Hours later, it would randomly start responding again. I thought it might be ghosts nodes (since I had a couple) but cleared those out using the z-wave stick method and still the issue. Tried removing and including devices, and on and on. Finally reached out to CS but with our back and forth only being able to go at my slow speed, CS eventually stopped responding. That's my bad, but I just had my hands full and would respond only when I could.
Finally got fed up and switched back to ST. I lost things that I grew to like about Hubitat but gained a reliable Z-Wave mesh that has not gone down or given me any problems yet. As for Hubitat, I'm not selling my hub or tossing it out the window or anything instead I'm monitoring topics like this for a sort of "ah ha" moment of some fix and then may try it again. robricc, you're not alone.
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I was where you are a while back.
I used a 700 series USB stick to remove all ghost devices.
I plugged in a couple of Z-Wave range extenders at intermediate locations.
No serious problems since.
Aeotec Range Extender 6, Zwave Extender, Z-Wave Plus Repeater, 2 Pack https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07GRYTHBQ/
(There appears to be a newer model but I have the model 6.)
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Hi @Antolope . I know I'm not alone. That's why I tried fixing my own problems for months before bringing the issue up here. There are plenty of threads on this forum and Reddit with a similar discussion.
I appreciate that people put their time in to making the product and contribute to this platform... many of them unpaid. But, at the end of the day, I paid money for this device. I have a right to say it sucks at doing something. And, unless I'm mistaken, Zwave and Zigbee are its primary method of communicating with external devices. If you have a lot of Wifi smart switches you should be using Home Assistant or maybe Alexa. If you have a lot of Zwave/Zigbee switches, you should be looking at Smartthings or Hubitat. Unfortunately, the Hubitat C7 is not good at Zwave. One of the things it needs to be great at.
The Hubitat platform is just what I wanted otherwise. I would love to use it. But something as simple as turning off my three porch lights at sunrise fails almost every day. Not completely, but usually one or two will remain on. If you stand in the right place, you can see each switch without turning your head.
Like you, I have other paths to take. It will just take time to move everything over, and I'm not looking forward to it.
PS- As I was typing this, @Hal3 made a reply about ghost nodes, zsticks, and range extenders. I had ghost nodes on my network and remedied them using a Zwave stick. But why did I have to do that? Why did I have to spend money on that stick, give my life story to download that bloated software, and then read an 11 page document on how to fix a problem that should not exist? Why should I need to buy more range extenders? There are more line-voltage Zwave devices in this new house by far than the old place. At some point, you just have to admit it's not working out and move on. If it works for you (and I don't doubt it does), that's great. I wish it did for me, but it just doesn't.
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Why do you need to use another controller to remove ghost devices?
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For the most part, this is an empathetic (if not downright sympathetic) bunch. I, however, am perfectly happy being a jerk. I wish you the best of luck telling your story of triumph on a HA forum. Goodbye.
Not sure why folks choose to suffer for months, but if your only interaction is to complain and then dismiss reasonable troubleshooting efforts by staff and community members, then I am happy to see you leave.
Suggesting I move the device back to the place it was working just as poorly in isn't reasonable.
It is reasonable to expect that a Zwave hub placed within 12 feet of a bank of 3 Zwave dimmers is able to reliably control them.
I'll be gone once this thread dies and I've moved on. But, my complaints are valid and the hostile reaction to them should give anyone about to jump to this platform pause.
I don't know the answer to that. I am not as knowledgeable as many others in this community.
I do recall my initial frustration with Hubitat. You can look at my old postings if you are incredibly bored or constipated. I moved from SmartThings and didn't even know what a Z-Wave network was. Everything just worked.
With Hubitat, I had ghost devices and couldn't exorcize them with the Hubitat alone. The stick was about $35 and I was able to clean up my Z-Wave network in about 45 minutes.
At first I was ready to give Home Assistant another try. Four or five years ago I was trying to get Hassio to work when I gave up and ordered the old SmartThings hub. That was a good choice for me at the time.
So, I have a drawer full of Raspberry Pi's including a 4 that are standing by but Hubitat is the devil I know for now.
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I can empathize with the OP on this one. Even though my zwave devices have been running fine it has taken me a lot to get to this point.
I have also learned a hell of a lot about zwave and the mesh, ghost devices, s0 vs S2, bad devices, the effects of power reporting, bandwidth limits, edge devices etc to get to this point. It's been a fun ride.
I know a lot of people just want to add their device and start using them but as you add more devices and the mesh starts to grow you need to understand a bit more about how they work. It's not an easy task.
One thing I found on my C7 is that a power down seems to fix a number of things. I've had issues with my locks not responding. A simple reboot didn't help. They didn't start working until I unplugged the device for 30s and plugged it back in.
I dont know why it works but that has now been my go-to solution whenever I have issues adding new devices.
Keep in mind hubitat is also the first hub with the 700 chip in it. I think that may be part of the growing pains.
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Well it is reasonable if you moved the device and broke the mesh. Like I stated above, maybe neither place is good. But you should at least try that advice, especially when multiple people, some of them very well versed in Zwave, are asking you to do so. You could at least try it, and report back not just dig in and not even give that a chance.
Well yes and no. If the devices were previously routing through other devices, then the hub may not know how to route to them if you are moving the hub around. Also, if you had/have ghosts, you might be routing into the void and it never gets to these devices. So it isn't a sure thing that if something is X distance away it will be picked up by the hub.
The only one that was remotely hostile was Hal3 Hatallica a couple posts up, and that was sort of uncalled for. But I see what he is saying, you don't seem willing to try things or help us help you.
I would beg to differ with you on that. There are many others here who have had great success with Zwave and Hubitat no matter the version.
Sure there are some who seem to have troubles, but my opinion is that it is down to a few bad acting devices, and the environment they are in more so than the hub itself. Sure the Zwave 700 chipset has had a few "quirks" since introduction, but it isn't so bad as to make things completely unusable.
Things like turning on frequent and many power reporting options would be one example of things people do and it could crash Hubitat. The Zooz 4-in-1 sensors seem to spam the hub and cause trouble. There are a few more examples of this, hopefully you get the idea.
This is one of those 700 series quirks in my opinion. Hopefully the Zwave Alliance will make this better at some point. Sometimes the ghost removal in Hubitat works just fine, and other times you have to call Peter Venkman, Ray Stantz, and Egon Spengler to your house and blow up the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man to make them go away.
Edit: Sorry HAL3! I got distracted while typing, and just saw the letter "H". Apologies!
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I was in the same boat as you and move to Home Assistant last month. Zwave-JS has been amazingly stable. Good luck.
With limitations. No S2 for instance.
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At this point I’ll take stable.
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Fair enough, but FWIW, many of us do have stable zwave networks on C-7 hubs. Even with a few 300-series devices in the mix.
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I'm sorry!
Which part did you perceive as hostile?
No hostility was intended!
Sorry! Edited my post above. Wasn't you!
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