Problems with lots of Greenwave powernodes in one part of house

My setup is well contained in a tight area (a flat) - my hub is central and no z-wave power socket is out of range.

Everything seems to work great during the day when testing (who needs many lights on in the day?).

I also have other brands of power sockets (Samsung amongst others) and Zigbee sockets and sensors. I have a Zwave range extender serving my workshop.

What happens frequently is this:

At night, the lights all work
(kitchen is 5 sockets controlled by a virtual switch - all greenwave)
(lounge is 5 more, 4 greenwave 1 samsung - on a virtual switch)
(Hallway is 2 sockets - greenwave - on a virtual switch)
(bedroom is one socket, homeplus?)
(Garage is several sockets greenwave and zigbee, and a few sensors.)

Kitchen lights come on, go off when I leave (motion sensor).
Lounge lights come on when i tell alexa to turn them on.
Hallway lights come on when I tell alexa.

Some nights I activate “bed time” and ALL the lights go off. Perhaps with a small ripple of delays).
Then other nigghts, like last night, 4 of the 5 in the kitchen refused to respond.
Neither hallway light responded.
1 of the 5 went off (the samsung).
I repeated the commands. Nothing happened.
In the end I switched everything off manually.

This morning everything is working again.

I’m starting to assume it’s a Greenwave powernode problem. There certainly are not range issues in the house. Everything is close, and there are powered sockets making a very robust link where the furthest sockets might be an issue. The lights in the lounge are a few metres away at worst.

Anyone else suffering with this? I’ve got 10 greenwave nodes and I’m seriously considering trying to return them,

Just a thought:

Greenwave power nodes will become unresponsive to wireless commands if there is a power overload. You have to press the physical switch to reset them. So this could explain the behaviour you are seeing.

What device handler are you using? If mine, is there any history of faults being reported?

Hi - they are all low power loads - lights - either LED or energy savers.

I was using yours, but I’ve been trying generic z-wave switch handlers to see if that was part of the problem. I can’t see much in the events that tells me anything other than a long line of ping commands being sent, and eventually that the device is offline

I just did another network repair and it claimed a light in the kitchen failed to respond, and one in the hallway (metres from the hub). Kitchen one is furthest away.

I toggled the hallway light with the app no problem…
The kitchen was unresponsive. I manually toggled it with the button, then it was immeidatley responsive with the app…

Could you suggest a level of logging with your handler that might help to identify what on earth is going on?

Ah yes, you are the person who reported slow response times. That leads me to suspect that you have some routing problems with your z-wave network or that your z-wave network is being saturated with commands (this can happen for example if you have lots of device associations configured). I recommend a network heal.

It could also be that you have a dodgy repeater device…

Just did that (a zwave repair) as posted above before I saw your reply. After pressing the button on one of the switches (which brought it back to life).

Repair now run without errors but I’d be keen to have your thoughts on what logging level I shoudl run and what to look for in the logs.

If the problem is power-related then using my handler in “Info” or “debug” logging level should be sufficient. Any power alarms/faults will be logged as warnings anyway, so you should see events raised against the fault attribute, as well as messages in Live Logging.

However, given the symptoms you are describing, it think it’s more likely you have fundamental issues with your z-wave network. Could be interference, could be a dodgy device, could be network congestion, or any number of other issues. My DTH won’t help diagnose any of that unfortunately.

@zcapr17 has given you lots of great advice, but I just wanted to add one more possibility…

Z wave devices are not affected by Wi-Fi interference, which is good. However, they can be affected by Devices in an overlapping range, particularly some older baby monitors.

Since you are seeing the problems at a particular time of day, that often indicates a local interference issue.

Is it possible that one of your neighbors has a young child and is turning on a baby monitor in the evenings? This sort of problem can be particularly difficult to diagnose if it’s a device you yourself don’t have control over.

I’ve mentioned before in the forums that I have terrible problems with the SmartThings arrival sensor on most weekdays starting around 3:30. That’s a zigbee device, so it can be affected by Wi-Fi, particularly boosted WiFi. I’m fairly sure that one of my neighbors has a child who gets home from school around then and starts flooding their network with activity. :disappointed_relieved:

One other possibility that hasn’t been mentioned that would be time related is power reporting in the evenings when many devices are on at once.

I haven’t heard of this specific situation with the greenwave devices, but there’s a known issue with the Aeotec pocket sockets that do energy reporting where if two of them are fairly close together but both are more than one hop away from the hub they will flood each other with repeater requests and messages may fail to get through. The easiest work around is just to move one of them farther away and replace it with a pocket socket that doesn’t do energy reporting. It’s certainly possible that something similar might be happening in your case.

You didn’t say which model you have but from the discussions above I’m assuming they are doing energy reporting. If it’s possible to turn that off, you might try that as a next diagnostic step.

Anyway, none of that is to say that the suggestions already made are incorrect. I just wanted to mention these two possibilities as they can be harder to diagnose unless you’re looking specifically for them, but they are two that would be on my list if the problem only occurs at specific times of day.

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