Hey guys-
I wanted to post a final message to this thread for anybody who might find it months from now.
I’m finally happy with the performance of my ST system and I’m keeping it. Here are a few of the issues that got it working properly for me.
PROBLEM:
Z-wave network weirdness. In my initial setup I ended up moving several z-wave devices around and generally adding things until I got devices positioned where I wanted them, and got the coverage in all rooms that I wanted. I think this is probably a typical growth scenario with HA. What happened however was that the z-wave network routing became corrupted. I clearly had devices routing incorrectly, especially battery powered ones, and had a few “phantom” devices that had been removed, but were nonetheless in the route path for other devices. This was causing the network to drop messages, which resulted in weird, intermittent behavior.
SOLUTION:
Unplug the hub and remove the batteries for at least 15 minutes so that all child devices “forget” their associations and routing is rebuilt from scratch.
Make sure battery powered zwave devices were awake and stayed awake long enough to be included in the z-wave network repair.
PROBLEM:
Crappy logic using SmartApps or using the third party rules engine, SmartRules. Neither solution offered enough logical primitives to do what I wanted to do. The result was a mess of convoluted work arounds using SmartRules, SmartApps, and Routines that often ran into each other and produced weird results.
SOLUTION:
Move all logic into CoRE
PROBLEM: devices mis-reporting state, failing to report state, or failing to report in a timely manner.
SOLUTION:
This is more easily addressed once the network and programming are working properly. Still somewhat of an issue with a couple of devices- A lock, contact sensor, and humidity sensor specifically. The solution here is either to replace the devices (the lock specifically in my case), or reconfigure the device to report properly (humidity sensor, and still working on it). As for the contact sensor, it’s outside on a gate and I’m guessing my attempts at waterproofing it have something to do with its behavior, so I’m not too concerned about it.
Anyway, that’s about it. I hope this is helpful to some future SmartThing pioneer. Getting the z-wave network straight is of particular importance, but there are few tools with which to see and diagnose problems so you may not know you have an issue.
Have fun!
