Finally given up on Zooz…

Curious if anybody else has struggled with Zooz products? I’m running a mix of Honeywell zwave switches/dimmers/ receptacles plus a pretty good number of Zooz Zen22, Zen27 and RGBW dimmers. The Honeywell stuff has been rock solid for almost 2yrs now. The Zooz products are routinely dropping off the zwave network or requiring a reboot to reconnect. While the nerd in me can tolerate a light switch requiring a hard reboot, the wife and kids just don’t get it. The Zooz people were supportive in the beginning but they’ve basically shut down and left me out in the cold. It sounds like they’ve seen similar issues in the past but are not prepared to stand behind they’re products.

Just me or are others seeing similar issues? I have pulled the plug on all the Zooz nodes and will be replacing with something hopefully more reliable.

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I don’t think it’s just you, but I don’t think it is Zooz either. I am not seeing any similar reports on other home automation platforms. The issues appear to be the smartthings transition, and are affecting multiple brands, just different ones for different people.

I don’t think we’ll know for sure where things are for another couple of months until the transition is complete. If you don’t want to wait for that, I understand, but I wouldn’t get rid of your switches: chances are they would work just fine with a different hub brand. :thinking:

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No issues with Zooz products here. Mix of 2x and 7x dimmers/switches. Both on DTH’s and Edge drivers. V2 hub. I’ve never even needed to power cycle them.

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I have several zooz switches a mix of zen23 and zen24 that just randomly drop off and require a reboot and very rare it requires to be excluded and re-added to the system. @TheSmartestHouse can you please chime in about this problem.

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I’ve got a motley mix of Z-wave devices, mostly Zooz ZEN27 and ZEN26. Also a couple of GE/Jasco dimmers and some Leviton switches and dimmers. Haven’t had any issues with any of them.

I’m on a V2 hub. All my Z-wave devices are still on stock DTHs waiting for automatic migration.

No beta code, no community drivers. Some of my ZigBee devices have been auto-migrated to Edge drivers.

Edit: also possibly of note, none of my devices were paired using S2 security.

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As @JDRoberts mentioned, with SmartThings constantly making platform changes, it’s very challenging to diagnose issues like these without more context. There is nothing in the firmware of Z-Wave devices, regardless of the brand, that would cause them to disconnect from the hub. What we’ve seen are issues with S2 security on SmartThings that we have no way of investigating since we don’t have access to the backend of the platform. We don’t have any control over how ST handles communication with the switches on the backend to see what’s causing issues like these. One thing we can recommend is to exclude and re-include devices now that the new platform is up which may improve how Z-Wave commands are handles for these devices on SmartThings.

Whenever we’re able to identify an issue, we do our best to fix it, that’s why we release so many firmware updates and new versions for all of our products. We’re as frustrated as our customers whenever an issue goes unresolved. Part of it is that unfortunately, we don’t decide how platforms implement Z-Wave in their systems.

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Thank you for the quick reply.

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I can speak for the Zen32, I have 5 of them in my house. Overall the only issue is onboarding them. Sometimes it’s seen as a generic zwave device. What I have done in exclude it and readd, firmware update. The newer firmware seems more rock solid. I’ve only seen a need for a hard reboot once.

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No problem. You can always get in touch with Zooz support to troubleshoot your devices in more detail if needed!

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I have 3-4 zooz products on my zwave network and they are rock solid. Getting ready to add another switch tomorrow most likely.

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I have two particular Zen72’s that would drop off and need to be paired again. One or the other would nearly always drop when removing other devices. They are both mounted in a two gang box with a GE fan controller which never drops. But they are the furthest switches from my hub. I added a z-wave outlet close to each them, updated the firmware and moved to edge at the same time and so far they have appeared to be rock solid. I added the z-wave outlets as close as possible to two Zooz ZSE41 open/close sensors that would discharge rapidly when the Zen72’s went down, the low battery notification was usually how I found out the Zen72 was offline as they are in the least used rooms in the house.

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To clarify things a bit, in addition to routinely dropping off the zwave network and going offline, the ZEN22 and ZEN27 Zooz switches are just locking up and becoming non-responsive even as a basic, finger pushing, paddle switch. You walk into a dark room, you push the light switch and …… nothing happens. Easy fix of course, after finding a flashlight that works, you simply have to find a small flat bladed screw driver and carefully pry out the air gap switch to reset the zooz switch. Most of my family has become fairly adept at this and no longer even ask for my help. Seriously - a light switch that needs to be reset even to work as a manual, finger pushing switch? Beyond the frustration this creates, if you’re not super careful, it’s easy to break the plastic pull tab. The smartest house folks would not send me replacement tabs so a tiny piece of broken plastic renders a $40 switch useless.

After an insane amount of time on emails and phone calls with their support people, I’m pretty sure I’m not the only one with these issues. They alluded to the “new” products being better but would not accept the ones I had recently purchased back in some sort of exchange.

I started off with high hopes for Zooz but after all the time that’s gone into this I’m just not impressed. @TheSmartestHouse

This is definitely not normal behavior and could be related to installation issues or a configuration problem on SmartThings, or a unique combination of multiple factors. We’re very sorry to hear that the switches aren’t working correctly for you. It’s challenging to comment on the statement without context. If you send us a message with your email address we’ll be happy to look into the communication history for you to see what else can be done!

We always service devices within warranty period (and often a few months beyond as well) and offer discounts on replacements for products out of warranty. The 500 series products you’re referencing have been discontinued for almost 2 years now, they’re the previous generation of switches that were covered under a 12-month warranty. The current 700 series models are covered under a standard 12-month warranty and an extended 5-year warranty once registered. This is just to clarify the coverage for the products :slight_smile:

How many Zen27 dimmers do you have? Do you have any other Z-wave dimmers in use?

I’ve got eight Zen26 dimmers and 10 Zen26 switches that have been installed and working perfectly for between three and four years.

At one point I was having responsiveness issues with my Z-wave mesh that affected some of my Zooz, Leviton, and GE/Jasco devices. I replaced about half a dozen Z-wave devices with ZigBee and used the Z-wave devices elsewhere. All the Z-wave devices involved worked fine when moved elsewhere in the house.

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Was up to 33 Zwave devices with a ST hub v3. Response times were good with devices that were within a couple of hops, further out devices were a bit slow but typically worked ok when all the devices were online. If even one of the zen devices went offline it could take down a good percentage of the network.

I have just removed almost all of the zen devices except the RGBW controllers so will see how the latency compares. Remaining zwave devices are Jasco/Homeseer/RGBW plus a few Zen22s.

I suspect I will have issues with some of the far away devices as the network is now much less densely populated.

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