2nd Hub Headache

Hey I am new to the forum, but was hoping this was a good place to get support.

So the story starts with me wanting to do a firmware update on a z-wave switch. Knowing that the smarthings hub does not do this I pulled out an old Z-Stick S2 (Aeon Labs) and used a z-wavemgtt to perform the update on the switch in question. At this point everything was happy. My small network of 2 z-wave switch and 2 hubs lived in harmony.
I decided that I did not want to have the Z-Stick hub on my Z-wave network and excluded it from the Smarthings hub. This is when things went south. I lost 1 of my z-wave switches then.
I have since performed every possible troubleshooting option I could think of on both the hub and the z-wave switch in question to no avail.

  • Power cycle hub
  • Power cycle switch
  • Exclude switch from network (works)
  • Network repair.

I threw in the towel and called support and asked to have my z-wave table/database wiped or reset. They then made me do all the trouble shooting steps again and are forwarding my complaint to tier 2 support.

Anyways is there anyone on here that knows how to do this without a hub reset? I have about 11 zigbee devices that I do not want to setup again, was hoping there is a back door for this kinda thing.

If I understand what you’re describing, you shouldn’t have to redo everything. But you will have to add the missing switch back as a new device to the remaining hub. And in order to do that, you will probably have to do a Z wave exclude on it first.

I think you can still do a Z wave exclude using the new hub, but they’ve changed the way you do that a couple of times and I’m not sure of the exact details right now. Someone else should know. :thinking:

Here’s The official support article, but I don’t know if it’s up-to-date. You want to do a general exclude as though the device had never been connected to your hub.

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So the steps to get the switch to show up are:

  1. issue a “general exclude” from the new hub and exclude the missing switch. It’s OK that the missing switch isn’t showing up on your smartthings account, it doesn’t need to for this step. you will have to do something physical to the missing switch, usually a specific tap pattern, to get it to accept the exclude command, so you may have to find the user manual for the switch to check that.

  2. after that, just add it as a new switch. It should still have the firmware update. :crossed_fingers:t3:

one thing to check …

when trying to add the device back… sometimes you don’t get a message that a device has been added or it times out… go to the Devices section and check under No room assigned or All Devices to see if perhaps it did get added. Also look for a device labelled as Thing.

check for ghost devices on your network since it is z-wave.

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Thanks for the reply…

I have performed the general exclude on the z-wave switch. This step does work and the app reports 1 device excluded. After that I perform a repair on the z-wave network and then try to add the switch in. The Smarthings hub can exclude the switch all day, but will not include it.

Good tip… I just looked over all the devices with no luck. Man it would of been nice if it was just sitting there. :slight_smile:

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What’s the brand and model of the switch?

Also, do you still have the other controller available? Do you have the software available to run it? Just on the off chance, if you do, you could try The second controller and see if it’s still showing up there. If it is, the exclude didn’t work.