I have the v1 hub, I bought the full kit a while back, tried to set it up and got frustrated with the lack of reliability and tossed it in a box for quite some time. Finally decided to pull it out several weeks ago and am still finding its not working. So I figure before it goes in the trash for good this time I will see if I am just really doing something wrong.
I have several z-wave outlets wired up and paired for use with bedroom space heaters. The idea is that I would like them to turn on about 30 minutes before bed and turn off at a scheduled time in the morning. So I setup a smartApp of Turn On at 10pm and turn off at 5am. It seems to work alright for a few days before it just seems to stop trying to turn it on. When i troubleshoot by logging into the app and cycling the outlet with the app through the hub it seems to work without issue. So it does not seem to be a connection issue. and when i check the log on the days that it worked i see “turn bedroom heat on at 10pm” followed by “bedroom heat is on” on the days it does not work I do no see either of these in the notifications. Once it stops working it doesnt seem to want to start working again until I completely re-setup the SmartApp. Once i do that it seems to work without issue again for a short while before it just stops working again.
On top of that I am having another issue with paring new devices. I have a pair of outlets that I have been trying to pair (one smartthings that came with my kit and one monoprice which looks like a GE outlet) and neither of them are being detected by the hub when they are put into pairing mode about 3-4 feet from the hub. I tell the hub to locate new devices and the app just spins and spins but never finds a new device. I have previously been able to successfully pair in the past.
Thank you, I will give this a try. Hopefully it works, but honestly it doesn’t speak well to the platform that you need to utilize work arounds like this.
Timed based triggers don’t work very well from my experience regardless of the hours. I honestly like using motion based triggers set to a time frame. These have never failed on me.
also plan for failures. For example I will issue 2 or more commands to turn a system off by separate criteria, separate timing, to increase the likelihood of actually turning the system off.
I recommend monitoring your system/process by ST and redundant channels.
But there always remains the possibility of NO COMMANDS EXECUTING AT ALL, so I do not rely on ST for a critical service or to turn on/off a high heat source.
Many problems are not only ST failures. ST functions and wireless devices have been misapplied by the users based on the advertisements, which are incomplete information. These forums are the best practical information you can get and it takes a while to pull the details out.
I have picked up a Homeseer and the setup curve is a bit higher, but I have been 10 times happier. You can actually test the mesh and optimize the network for the zwave devices. The first thing I did after excluding and adding all the devices was testing communication. The outlet that I have been having some issues with wasn’t reliability connecting. So I re-optimized the mesh and now the communication appears to be instantaneous and rock solid across all the nodes. I doubt this was the actual issue as I didnt have issues manually triggering the outlet before nor was there anything in the notifications indicating that there was any attempt to fire the trigger on the times it failed. I suspect the optimize was required due to the order I re added the devices.
Being that everything is triggered locally on the homeseer I have much higher hopes about the reliability of the system. I figure I will give this a shot for a few weeks and see how it suits me and then I will probably toss my zigbee accessories and smartthings on ebay.