Hub Firmware Beta 0.25.22

I hadn’t noticed any Z-wave issue with the last release, all my issues were with Zigbee, Osram lights and ST presence sensors.
Great fun when Goodnight routine sends off command to lights that were already off & it turns them on.

Hi @cbaumler,

I just added a brand new GE zwave plus fan controller (device ID 6D), but it did not register correctly:

It should look like this (right?):

It’s performing really slow and device states in the app aren’t reflecting physical device states/speeds.

EDIT: If I use the up or down arrows, the device will speed up or slow down, but the app won’t update. Physical changes aren’t showing up either.

Those are the actions through the Classic mobile app, and the device did turn on and change speeds, but ST never updated the app or IDE.

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My network came to a grinding halt during a network repair. I believe it had to do with an attempt to expose more status messages that were previously being dropped. I am not sure what the fix was in .22.

I have been running a network repair for the past 3 hours and it is still working on it. Every drop of zwave mesh network is drained in the process so the few things I tried to control are unresponsive.

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0.25.21 ended up being released internally only. 0.25.22 contains the changes made in 0.25.21.

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The issue is that network repair takes much longer than normal to complete or does not complete. Large would be networks with 100+ Z-Wave devices.

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This is welcome. I’m at about that number. Repairs takes 30-35 minutes for me.

It’s also interesting as we’ve seen SmartThings Support state in the past that repairs on networks with over 30 devices was not recommended.

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I never understood that comment. If you have more than 30 devices, you should just leave your stuff broken?

Does that mean more than 30 zwave devices are NOT supported?

If that is true, what is special with 30? Why is 29 okay?

Does SmartThings support having 30 zwave devices?

In other words if they say you should not zwave repair with 30 devices then SmartThings does not support having 30 zwave devices.

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I think that was bad info in my opinion. I’ve had close to 100 zwave devices not too long ago, and my repairs were going north of an hour, but they did complete. I do think there is a max number of zwave devices if I remember right (256?).

Over the last 2 months I’ve been significantly reducing my zwave devices and moving to zigbee where I can. It’s made a world of difference for me. My zwave population is much smaller, and repairs take less than 30 minutes, and I’m also still over 30 devices (64 as of last count). None of my zwave devices are battery powered anymore.

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I had a zooz power strip in my kids’ bedroom to control all the gizmos used for their bedtime routine and sleeping comfort. After many suspected zwave related issues I converted the setup to SmartThings Zigbee outlets and to date, a few weeks later, it has been flawless. I think I need to convert some of my devices to Zigbee as you did. I am around 110 zwave devices and the network repair I just ran took 7 hrs to complete. This is most likely an exception as it usually doesn’t take that long however it is no longer a few minutes task.

I have no hard data to back this up, but when I was rebuilding my system after migrating to v3, I started having issues when I got close to 40 devices back online. After that threshold it just seemed to get harder and harder the more I added devices back.

As for zigbee I should be just under 40 devices. I would not mind converting all my battery operated devices to zigbee but there don’t seem to be comparable equivalents for everything. For example the Zooz 4 in 1 sensor, is there something similar that uses zigbee? By similar I mean with all the same data points or at the very least motion, temp and humidity.

The latest gen Iris motion sensor was motion, temp and humidity :confused:

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Hi @aruffell,

As Jimmy mentioned, those latest motion sensors are great, if you can find them. It doesn’t have Lux values though.

When I’m all done, I’ll have converted all my in-wall switches to GE Zigbee devices, as well as a few smart plugs. The in-wall switches have allowed me to repurpose my Iris plugs since they’re now mesh routers too. Those Iris devices replaced all my Aeon zwave plugs, and a few outdoor outlets in areas where weather isn’t an issue for me.

All sensors are now Zigbee, and the performance has be outstanding. In fact, switch performance has been outstanding too. Everything is using stock DTH’s, and automations are mostly local, and super fast.

In the end, I’ll have roughly 30 zwave devices left, mostly all zwave plus. Some are GE fan controllers, and Aeon micro switches, as well as Zooz smart plugs on large appliances. I’ll be actively keeping an eye out for their Zigbee counterparts.

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Hey I’ve had a GE fan controller reporting humidity and luminance level for the last 3 or 4 FWs. I’ve just learned to live with it.

I think I might have saved that “support” email when he said that since I have more than 30 devices I should just expect to have issues because most users don’t have that many devices.

LOL, the official stance on this should be cleared up by ST management and it would hopefully fall in line with what the technology is designed for… and that is 256 nodes per zwave network and network repairs encouraged when adding, removing or moving zwave devices.

I honestly find it irritating to be told otherwise without a disclaimer, if it were to be the case, that ST doesn’t support over X devices and its network repair implementation is not efficient over X devices, etc. I am NOT saying it is the case, but if there are indeed such limitations on the ST platform then they must be made clear along with the otherwise nonsense recommendation of <30 devices and not to run repairs.

However, if you think about it, the more devices you have, the higher the chances of issues too as each device contributes to possible issues. The sweet-spot, is when you have enough devices for a strong zwave mesh backbone, and few enough for fast / no collision communications on the network.

Yup, all good points. It’s interesting that this topic has come up while I’m swapping out zwave for zigbee and doing zwave repairs to keep my zwave mesh clean.

I’ve noticed that my FortrezZ water flow device (zwave plus) stops responding after every single zwave repair I do. I’ve literally reproduced this problem over 30 times, and I expect to do it 8 more times later today.

FortrezZ support has no idea what’s going on, so I’m wondering if it’s an ST driven problem since I still have almost 70 devices in my mesh. At first I thought it was a FortrezZ firmware issue, but now I’m rethinking that.

I have no way to deep dive into my zwave mesh to see what’s going on with a repair, so I may create a CenterCode ticket to see if @Kianoosh_Karami can use his toolbox when I run my next zwave repair.

The Zwave toolbox shows me the hops between the node and the toolbox sitting right next to the hub so it gives me an idea of what the hub is doing assuming the two controllers picked the same or similar routes. I wonder whether your FortrezZ water flow device keeps wanting to use a troublesome node nearby. Given the number of devices you have it is likely that it has many paths to the hub so I wonder why it is not trying other paths. Could the device be getting overwhelmed with the traffic? Have you tried to powercycle the device to restore it?

The red lines are most likely sleepy battery zwave devices, if not, then they are devices with issues (not my case).

I have to do that every single time a zwave repair completes. I’ll have to spend some time learning/understanding Zwave toolbox.

@cbaumler I keep seeing orphaned device messages while doing a network repair, Unable to update mesh info for device 0C (which doesn’t exit) with the current firmware (24.20).

Does the new firmware (25.22) have the ability to clean/remove these orphaned devices that no longer exist from the Z-Wave controller?

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I didn’t notice anything amiss in the hub log. Feel free to DM me and @Kianoosh_Karami if the problem persists.