For months I have had a LFM-20 switch connected to my garage door activating by itself. In the LOG it always shows “DEVICE/physical” as the source of the activation. I was told by support the log entry means someone physically pressed the button on the switch. While I understand them saying that, it simply isn’t the case. Now I have another switch, a Evolve LRM-AS connected to my kitchen light that just turned on by itself. I have no apps that command these switches to turn on and yet this is happening. People say the switches are defective and yet my second LFM-20 to replace the first one still exhibits the same behavior. I simply do not buy the defective switch theory. I am not saying SmartThings is the cause but there is definitely something interfering with my setup. Is there any way determine what is causing this?
Switches turning on by themselves
Since we do not see this with others running the same switches with ST, I would assume that there is something electrically wrong. Do you have switches working in other areas ok? If not, what and when do they exhibit this behaviour
Strangely enough, I just had the same experience with one of my GE 45609s. After turning on twice the in the middle of the night in our bedroom, my wife had me remove it. My logs showed the same thing “Device/Physical”
I had just assumed that the switch was going bad or there was some electrical surge that was causing it to turn on. I have about 12 of these switches through out the house and haven’t seen the behavior in any of the others. This and the other switches have been in place for over two years.
Well so far I have not run into this issue at my place. Was that the only light? Did you run a Z-Wave Repair?
Mostly it is the LFM-20 switch activating my garage door which can happen at any time. The kitchen light was the first time that I can confirm. It is not like it happens all the time. The garage door has activated 5 times in the last year. It is NOT something electrical. ALL wiring is correct and there are no power surges. The LFM-20 has been replaced and it too has activated on its own. I was standing in the kitchen when the light came on. Nobody was near the switch which as also been installed for about a year. I have a total of 13 switches a various types. I have found on occasion some of those switches turned when they shouldn’t have been, The one that comes to mind is a space heater turned on in July but I could not confirm that it happened on its own because I was in the Android app and could have accidentally turned it on. I have not done a z-wave repair because there is nothing broken. At the request of support I have removed and added switches back but that doesn’t fix the problem.
Because the log states “DEVICE/physical” I was told this means a manual activation but I have since discovered this isn’t true. I have lights set to come on at dusk and when I look at the log it says physical whereas when they turn off it reports digital. It would be nice if there was a way to capture the data stream and save it so it can be analyzed. It isn’t much data, maybe 250MB per month. It would be a nice diagnostic tool.
It sounds like you did a good job of due diligence with troubleshooting. I have seen a case, just once where a defective Z-Wave switch was sending random packets out. Most of the time everything appeared normal, but every so often a light would go on or off. After finding a friend who had a receiver where we could monitor the z-Wave communications, I noticed that there was one switch sendiing out traffic. I replaced it, and all was well since.
I tried the ghost explanation with my wife but it didn’t fly. I’d rather have a haunted house than a malfunction switch or system, which puts my whole home automation “hobby” in jeopardy. 
Do you have any more info you could share re this receiver?
Yes, I would be very interested in what device you are using to monitor the data. Can you provide the manufacturer and the unit part number please?
@scottinpollock I will have to contact my friend, who has of course sense moved out of the area back to China. I had approached him with my issue, as I suspected the problem when I had replaced various switches but the issue was still ongoing. He stated he had a receiver that could be programmed for the frequency that was in use.
However, it would seem to me that ST could create a log of all hub messages that it receives, and what was the trigger and what triggered the switch. I know it does this to some degree for us, but not in eough detail at this point.
Continuing with the above story, we were able to monitor the Z-Wave commands in essence creating a Z-Wave Virtual device and then pairing with the Hub, this allowed us to monitor the commands, and see that one switch was sending out nonsense commands (99 percent did not work, but one would and that would cause the random issue)
I actually had more fun trying to resolve it, I love troubleshooting (SMILE)
Edit: The receiver is something he had, I have sent a mail to him to ask for hardware specs and if he could send me the code that we collaborated on together as I have had a HD crash and the Zip is corrupt. This happened when I was using a competitors hub. So not with ST
@theedpope Keep us posted. I know I run into this all the time with PLM based stuff (happened again just yesterday), which is one of the reasons I am moving away from it. Interesting that Z-Wave modules can pollute the network, and it would be nice to have a device like that down the road.
@scottinpollock I will keep everyone in the loop here. I know the switch was sending out random packets for some reason, that just happen to fire a switch. It was actually a toggle event of some sort, because a switch would change states. Most of the time the switches that were affected were off, so it was turned on some times.
THe logs showed that the switch was sending invalid packets, many per hour. JUst that every now and then, it would actually map up to something I guess. I know when the switch was replaced that all the issues stopped.
I have a GE switch doing the same thing. Turns on/off at all times. I have changed the switch checked the wiring ten times but ??? And I have several in the house but that is the only one that gives me issues. I even completely shut off the hub but it still comes back on. The weird thing is I had the original one hooked up for months before it went cookoo. ??? Getting really annoying.
I have about 60 GE/Jasco smart switches/dimmers in my house along with several GE appliance modules. Same issues here numerous switches randomly turning on and off I done a bunch of unpairing of devices and some didn’t turn on again and some did. I factory rest my Vera Plus control and only added a few devices back but the problem came back with most of the devices I added along with some devices not added back in. My Vera plus is powered off and still having the issues. I’m guessing it’s a bad switch. I see Vera has a log for each device but it doesn’t have anything listed in the logs. Any thoughts on how to find the bad switch making and assumption I have a bad switch? Any other advice is welcome. Thank you in advance
You might want to ask your question in the Vera forums. You’ll probably have better luck. This forum is specific to SmartThings Hub users. And, this thread is 4 years old…