For some time now—years, actually—I’ve had the occasional Zwave device just “disappear” from my network. It is always while I’m away from that location (not creating events, such as walk-in to the field of a motion detector) and usually (I think!) on ‘sleepy’ devices, i.e., battery devices that wake only occasionally to report they’re still alive.
Recently, it’s worse.
All devices in this example, as reported by Simple Device Viewer, have since returned to the fold. Days later. When SmartThings wasn’t somehow wedged and was alert enough to hear them awaken and attempt to tell the world their battery wasn’t dead.
My Zwave mesh is good: each sleepy device that disappeared is within no less than 15 feet of a mains-powered repeater. The total number of devices is low—sixteen, in this house. Of course, it would be nice if we had a built-in network mapping tool. Alas, we don’t.
My network is Zwave only, no Zigbee—perhaps it also happens in that domain, but I don’t know.
The problem waxes and wanes. Perhaps its frequency varies as mysterious changes occur in the SmartThings cloud. Who knows? With no announcement of cloud software changes, we may never make the correlation. It’s been worse in recent months…
Since I’m in Florida and the aforementioned problems happened in New England, I can only be patient & wait. Remote hub reboot does nothing to help. Neither does Zwave mesh rebuild. I cannot go into panic mode and skitter around pulling batteries. I can only wait for the magical reappearance of the errant devices. Sigh.
Other than simply venting, I’m curious if others have seen “lost” devices simply re-appear days later if left on their own?
