Need advice for z-wave issues/slowness

TL;DR: Added, then removed Aeotec Z-wave Repeater 6. Z-wave is now intermittently acting incredibly slow.

Yesterday I was in process of installing some new lighting in the garage, planned to connect to a Zooz ZEN25. In preparation, I was adding an Aeotec Extender 6 to the network. It came highly recommended from a guy I follow on YT. I noticed that support is supposed to be built in to ST Hub and no custom handler needed.

I plug in the z-wave extender, use the newer ST app to add, click the button on the repeater and the repeater thought it joined, but ST never went past 30%. The device also doesn’t show in the IDE . This is when my problems started. All commands to any z-wave device would take 3-7 minutes to complete.

After about 6 hours, multiple z-wave repairs, ST hub reboots, I gave up. I set the hub to exclude, clicked the button and it was removed (funny, since ST didn’t “see” it). At that point, everything seemed to be working normal.

Fast forward 12 hours. My z-wave stuff is slow or offline again (repeater is not plugged in). After 5 repairs, things are working again… for now. I think my other devices are meshing to the garage fine… so probably don’t need the repeater.

If things get wonky again, what do you guys advise? Remove all devices and factory reset the hub? Upgrade to v3? Give it time?

ST hub is version 2.

Did the device pair from it’s end (see the manual), if so you may be running into this issue if you have any custom DTH’s - republish them all again. FAQ: My lock/device does not pair or appears to pair but it won't show up in the mobile app or IDE - stale DTH

You may need to check for ghost device and remove them. Open your IDE -> Click on My Devices, any devices there you don’t recognize? If so delete them. Then do a Z-Wave repair. Check your hub logs for any errors during the Z-Wave repair process.

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Thanks RBoy for taking the time to respond. I spent an hour on the phone with L1 support and they were stumped and agreed to escalate to L2. Unfortunately they said it would take 5+ days to get back to me.

Yesterday when I would do a repair I started getting errors that two devices couldn’t update their neighbors, couldn’t delete old routes or add new routes. It gave IDs of 0D and 0E, which were not listed in my devices in the IDE at all. Talk about ghost devices!

In any case, after working on nuking everything from orbit and rebuilding, I am functional again. Specifically I:

  1. Excluded all of my devices one at a time.
  2. Removed my hub from the IDE.
  3. Added a new location.
  4. Removed my old location.
  5. Used the starting code on the hub to reinstall.
  6. Joined my devices one at a time, closest to furthermost (including special handlers etc.

After all of this, everything is back to working as expected.

Wow. My issues are exactly as you described. Doing a full reset seems extremely painful at this point. So frustrated with SmartThings and their support.

Yeah, I don’t even have that many devices, automations or custom handlers and it took a while. The most time consuming was looking up manuals for all of the devices since they all seem to have different exclusion triggers. The good thing is I also added a couple of virtual switches and now I can control my GoLinear garage from Google Assistant. :slight_smile:
Good luck!